Question What are the chances of overvolting and killing a BIOS chip while flashing?

eloh!

Commendable
Mar 24, 2020
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1,535
Hello all,

A while back, I was on this forum asking if it was possible to repair a dead motherboard, and one of the fixes I was encouraged to try was to flash the board's BIOS IC. When I had the flasher, however, we couldn't figure out why the writes were unsuccessful until it was realized that the flasher was outputting 5V instead of the SOC's required 3.3V. To fix this, I had performed the 3.3V mod on my flasher, and the programming worked perfectly on the first try.
While, in the end, the board was still unresponsive, which likely indicated the issue was separate from the SOC, I had recently been thinking about the possibility that I had overvolted and killed the BIOS IC when I was previously writing to it with 5V. Could this be a rational possibility? If the IC was actually dead, would the flashing procedure be successful regardless?

Here is the BIOS IC, flasher I had used, and the motherboard I was troubleshooting if it helps any:
IC: Winbond 25Q128FVSQ 1651
Flasher: CH341A Programmer (with 3.3V mod here: 3.3V CH341a Signal Output Modification [Chuck Nemeth] )
MOBO: ASUS ROG STRIX B250i
ROG STRIX B250I GAMING | ROG Strix | Gaming Motherboards|ROG - Republic of Gamers|ROG Global (asus.com)

Here is the original post: Question - Can I repair a dead motherboard? | Tom's Hardware Forum

Thanks, everyone.