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DFI shows off P55 motherboards with USB BIOS flashing

by on05 June 2009

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Remember that mini USB port on the back of the leaked images of the DFI P55 motherboards? Well, it turns out that this is one of the best features on motherboards in years, at least for those that have had a BIOS flash go wrong.

Normally if you flash your BIOS and something goes wrong, there are two ways of fixing it. Either, you're lucky and you still have a floppy drive and you can recover the BIOS this way, although it's not exactly straight forward and it doesn't work on all motherboards. The other option is to either send the board off to have the BIOS chip replaced, or replacing by yourself, but these days that's no so easy, as most motherboards have the BIOS chips soldered onto the board.

DFI's solution to the problem is that you plug a USB cable into the mini USB port on the back of the board, run a piece of software on a second computer and this will allow you to flash your BIOS remotely from the other system. We're amazed that no-one has thought of this before, as it's a fairly obvious thing when you think about it. DFI has patented it and sadly this will likely mean that we won't be seeing this feature from other motherboard makers, unless they pay up to DFI or find their own way to do it.

All of DFI's Lanparty boards will support this feature from the P55 chipset and onwards.

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