PowerSpec B745 BIOS Upgrade

Smooth_J

So for the life of I can't seem to find this model motherboard anywhere on the MSI website... MSI Z490 Plus. I assume you could mean the Gaming Plus, but I want to be sure before I flash the motherboard and potentially brick it. The reason for the BIOS upgrade is that I always keep things up to date and I just picked up the system today.

Smooth_J

Looks like I found it... but its CN: https://cn.msi.com/Motherboard/Z490-S01 and the https://cn.msi.com/Motherboard/support/Z490-S01 still doesn't match the current BIOS version.

TSTDavey

Hello @Smooth_J thanks for posting on the Microcenter Community Forum. The Powerspec b745 has the MSP z490 Gaming Plus board installed. Below is a link to its website for the latest bios. If your system isn't posting, you may want to remove the CMOS battery from the board for 20 seconds, then reattach it to reset the bios. It should boot then.

Link: https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/support/MPG-Z490-GAMING-PLUS 

Techie007

Once again, I am trying to post the correct information about this computer. The PowerSpec B745 does NOT use the MSI Z490 GAMING Plus board. You will not be able to flash that BIOS; it will be unrecognized by the flashing tool. The PowerSpec B745 uses the cheaper, OEM MSI Z490 (non-gaming) Plus board with the model number Z490-S01, found on the MSI China website. The original poster found the correct support site and posted the link above (which I was apparently blocked from doing earlier). I can confirm that this BIOS works great and fixes a couple of bugs in the original PowerSpec BIOS. Make sure you disable MSI Fast Boot before flashing because it is functional in the newer MSI BIOS. If you leave it on, it will be nearly impossible to get back into the BIOS to change settings because it starts booting Windows right away. This setting has no effect on the broken PowerSpec BIOS.

As of this writing, the latest BIOS version for this board is 7C98v154, released December 15, 2020. I see that MSI recently released version 7C75vA6 for the Gaming Plus board, adding support for 11th generation CPUs. Hopefully, this update gets ported over to the Z490-S01 for the PowerSpec B745 in an update soon as well.