Question Upgrading the bios with out a CPU?

Is this even possible? I have a z490 board and some of those 11 chips are really nice. the 8 cores, running at just 65w clocking in around 5ghz sounds pretty solid to me. The only problem is i need to update my bios to do so. I'm pretty sure i need a chip, but i figured i'd ask. Perhaps just some shipping and i can send it back to asus, or maybe a computer store near me could do it? i dunno, maybe i should just drop in the i10 and not worry about it..

thoughts?
 
Some boards have BIOS flashback via USB, it depends on the model. Without that you'd need a CPU.

Just a heads up: Intel's current TDP numbers are not to be confused with actual power consumption.


I won’t rehash the full ongoing issue with how companies report power vs TDP in this review – we’ve covered it a number of times before. But in a quick sentence, Intel uses one published value for sustained performance, and an unpublished ‘recommended’ value for turbo performance, the latter of which is routinely ignored by motherboard manufacturers. Most high-end consumer motherboards ignore the sustained value, often 125 W, and allow the CPU to consume as much as it needs with the real limits being the full power consumption at full turbo, the thermals, or the power delivery limitations.

You'll need some decent cooling for a 11700K if you dont want it to throttle.
 
Ahh I dont think your board has BIOS flashback, Asus seems to only do it on ROG and X series boards unfortunately :( Double check but I think I'm right. You probably have to pick up a 10100 and sell it on if you want to flash to the latest.

I think 6/12 is about right for gaming right now, any less is not as future proof, and if you're doing some video stuff you might benefit from an 8 core more as you say.

The 11400F and 11600K seem like the pick of the 11 series for price performance, better than AMD currently I think. 11700 is obviously a bit more powerful and faster but uses a lot of power(heat) and costs a lot more

For an Intel 6 core and up I'd suggest a big dual tower air cooler if your case has room for it, or a 240/280mm AIO. They all cool roughly the same at the end of the day especially if you're not overclocking to the bleeding edge.

There's several big air coolers that are about the same, Noctua NHD-15 and NHD-15S, Deepcool Assassin III, Cryorig R1 Ultimate/Universal, and some others, and a million 240/280mm AIO's. The only thing with some air coolers, you might have to be careful if you have tall RAM or if your PCI-E slot is little close to the CPU slot. The NHD-15S does solve this by being offset to the upside and losing the front fan.

Of course AIO's dont have those kind of issues at all, but they also need replacing every few years where air coolers will go basically forever I'd personally go for whichever was quietest these days. Whatever floats your boat. :)
 
The 65Watt version is the non K model, just the 10600. It has a locked multiplier so you can't overclock it. It also wont boost the clock speed as high for as long making it a bit slower, hence the lower TDP.

For the 10600K Seems overclocking can increase the power consumption by quite a bit though, that will obviously depend on the voltage and multiplier used. I'd imagine you could get to 5 ghz but theres no way to say for sure.

The 10600KF is the overclockable version that doesn't include integrated graphics and can usually be had for a bit cheaper then the straight K version, if you can find one of those :)