What does this mean?? Some Intel H81 chipset motherboards may need a BIOS update prior to using Haswell Refresh CPUs???

[Alphastrike101]

Using pc part picker I'm am planing my first pc build, but have stumbled across this problem that I don't understand... Something about my mother board need a bios update??
Do I need to for my Asus H81M-PLUS Micro ATX mobo and my Intel I5 4460 cpu? Will it still work? can I update after installation? What are the solutions?
any advice would be extremely appreciated
Thanks in advance!
L

 

[lkrattlehead]

Apparently, according to ASUS' CPU support list, you'll have to upgrade the BIOS to support that. There are some manufacturers that ship their boards upgraded from factory - the ones that are made after an update is available - but I can not know if this is your case.
If you can, perhaps you should avoid this motherboard and go for one with standard compatibility. Some times these compatibilities appointed by BIOS are not so important, as to add support to some virtualization functions in certain CPUs, or to enable better threading in some CPUs, but most cases they are serious, and upgrading it is not something "comfortable".
If you can avoid it, do, but you can always research on google about it, someone else might have stumbled into that issue and had some results that might help you. I'll do a little research and if I find anything else I'll come back and tell you.

 

[lkrattlehead]

But, to be clear. It is a issue of this specific motherboard, not all motherboards. Just an example of what I went through when buying my PC is that I was looking for a board that would fit my FX 8320, which uses AM3+. Then I searched and the one with best VRM with a decent price in my country was the GA-970A-UD3P. The thing is, Gigabyte also had a GA-970A-DS3P and a GA-970A-UD3. The UD3 had 6 or 7 versions of BIOS, and it was needed an update to run the eight core processors, even though it had almost the same specifications, the exact same chipset, north and south bridges, same manufacturer, than my UD3P, which had only the standard BIOS from factory and worked with all processors.
If between a UD3 and a UD3P you can see a whole bunch of difference just from BIOS imagine all the possibilities between the chipset... keep looking, it is not a universal problem, and ASUS has some good chips too.
The thing is, though, I would recomend not using H81 and using instead the more potent chipsets because not only they provide more compatibility - more USB 3.0 ports, more PCIe speed, SLI - but in general they have better quality and last longer.