Got an MSI MPG 550 Gaming Carbon Wifi in the mail today.
I’ve spent a good five hours trying to get the flash bios button on the back to work. It will start flashing, keep going, and the light never stops blinking.
I am formatting the USB correctly. Using the right file system. Renaming the files to MSI.ROM.
Nothing is installed on the motherboard. I’ve used different USBs, and different PCs to format the USB.
Am I out of luck at this point and having to RMA?
Very frustrating since I ordered this part from Newegg without noticing that it said it was coming from China. So after waiting weeks I find out it wont work and have to return it. My next step from there would most likely be buying a more expensive motherboard which isn’t really in my budget. However, I don’t want to downgrade either.
I supposed I could install the rest of the hardware at this point and attempt to POST?
Shouldn’t be any risks in that at this point with modern hardware, but I am still scared after spending so much money on everything.
I am going to RMA this motherboard and return it to newegg. I’ve tried everything. Even had a buddy bring over a CPU That should have worked without flashing the bios and cant get it to POST. So time to return it. Going to go to microcenter and get one off the shelf since online the only ones I can find are being shipped from china. I’ve waited long enough.
Bought an asus tuf gaming wifi 2 board. It was in stock at a local pc shop. Manufacture date was 2025 so its bios was late enough to fire right up.
I did update the bios anyway once we were running. Now im having a new dilemma. When i set the memory to 3600 mhz it locks me o I t of boosting the cpu.
I did a bit of digging on this, and I think what’s happening is related to how AM4 handles memory and fabric speeds, not a bad board or bad BIOS.
From what I’m seeing, when memory is set to 3600 MHz, the board usually tries to run the Infinity Fabric at 1800 MHz (1:1) automatically. A lot of Ryzen CPUs seem to be right on the edge at that point. If the fabric isn’t completely stable, the system appears to play it safe and pull back CPU boosting/PBO, which can make it feel like boosting is suddenly locked out.
That would explain why it boots and runs fine at default settings, but boost behavior changes once 3600 MHz is enabled. ASUS boards, from what I’ve read, tend to be more conservative here — instead of crashing or failing to post, they just back off boost to keep things stable.
Things that might help:
• Dropping memory to 3200 MHz and leaving FCLK on auto. Boost usually comes back, and there’s very little real-world performance loss.
• Running 3600 can sometimes work, but it may require manual tuning, which I don’t really get into at that level.
Bottom line, I think this is more of an AM4 memory/fabric limitation than a motherboard problem. It looks like the board is choosing stability rather than hard crashing.
What I said is worth a try but I’m not 100% so if you can get a hold of him, arsenal PC is the one you really wanna talk to something like this.
Interesting i will give it a shot setting the ram to a lower setting amd see what that does. Interestingly when i turn on docp or xmp ithe profile description is 3603 mhz, odd number to me.
So i gmanaged to get pretty good performance. I turned off DOCP and set the ram frequency, voltage, and timings manually.
I enabled PBO and set core rato to auto.
No issues so far. Getting single clock boosts up to 5 Mhz and ram is at 3600 and I havent see any issue.