GA Z97N Gaming Mother Board

[JohnP]

Hi All,

I am new to building PC's. I have just purchased a GA Z97N & Intel G3258 which I will receive tomorrow. Looking on Gigabyte webpage it seems F3 BIOS is the preferred BIOS for the G3258. I have no idea if the mother board I have just ordered will already be loaded with this (I doubt it) so one of the first tasks I will need to do is update BIOS (which kinda scares me..) - As I understand the Z97N supports Q flash so is all I need to do is to boot into existing BIOS & then select update BIOS from drive & select appropriate USB... Is this correct? Also I'm confused what is UEFI???

Thanks for any help,  John

[dmdilks]

One thing you can try is boot with one stick of memory. I got a board from some body and it wouldn't boot with two sticks of memory. But it did with one stick. Ga-H81M-H. Updated the bios and everything was fine.

[Tiger]

I have the GA Z97N Gaming 7 and the G3258. The motherboard comes with an older BIOS, but it will still boot up with a G3258.

I used the EFI Flash Tool through DOS method to flash the BIOS. Basically, you need to make a DOS bootable USB 2.0 flash drive. I used the HP USB Disk Utility. You also can use Rufus.
https://rumorscity.com/2013/12/04/how-to-create-a-dos-bootable-usb-drive/

Third post in this thread is guide to EFI Flash Tool
http://forum.giga-byte.co.uk/index.php/topic,2441.msg89013.html#msg89013

I would also advise using a small USB 2.0 drive, 4GB or smaller, and test out the drive to see if it will boot up into DOS mode. Note: files are hidden on the drive so it may appear blank.