Newly bought X99 WS cannot boot with E5-1650 v4

alefsin,

Directly above the Dr.Debug LEDs lie your two BIOS chips. Assuming it is new, there are two stickers that cover the chips with the current BIOS revision printed on them, as shipped from the factory.

What is printed on the stickers?

If it is below 3.10 you can request a BIOS chip from ASRock. There's a good chance they will outright ship one to you. It's not unknown for  them to do this for you. If not they are $15.00.

http://event.asrock.com/tsd.asp

Keep us posted please.

alefsin wrote: Hi, Just an update regarding the issue: I checked the motherboard and indeed, the BIOS was and old version (P1.60). I contacted ASRock using the link wardog provided, explaining in details what has happened and specifically asked for a new BIOS chip. Till today I have receive 0 reply from ASRock....very disappointing. As I was somewhat expecting poor support from ASrock, at the same time I ordered a BIOS chip from bios-chip24.de. I received the chip yesterday and after replacing one the chips on the board with it, the motherboard booted with no issue at all. Today I finished setting up the system with Windows 10 and I have a very stable and fast system! It is a shame that ASRock is still selling motherboards with older BIOS versions, but is it worse that their support is not responsive. Anyway, I'd like to thank wardog and bios-chip24 helping me solve the problem! Cheers, AlefSin

The best method of requesting a new UEFI chip is with this link:

http://www.asrock.com/support/index.asp?cat=RMA

While that page lists a price for a new chip, in your situation I believe there will be little or no charge.

Regarding ASRock selling boards with older UEFI/BIOS versions, please consider some basic realities.

Mother board production is not done on a continuous basis, meaning a production run of one board model will be done in a large quantity, and then stopped. If that model's stock in ASRock's warehouse becomes low, more boards will be made at the production facility.

In general, X99 boards sell at a much lower volume than other, more mainstream mother boards, and less expensive boards. Considering the price range of X99 compatible processors compared to other Intel processors, an X99 system is a serious investment for most people, and not something most of us have.

Within ASRock X99 board models, the X99 WS is likely not a top seller, because it is not a "gaming" or "over clocking" oriented board. Therefore the amount of production is lower than other boards, and the chance of getting an earlier production board is greater.

The release of Broadwell-E processors, the only new processor model that can replace the original Haswell-E processors, occurred 20 months after Haswell-E was released. That's almost two years.

Can we expect, or is it even possible, for a mother board manufacture to recall their existing stock of X99 boards to replace the UEFI chips with Broadwell-E compatible UEFI versions? UEFI updates to support Broadwell-E were released by ASRock in March and April of 2016, prior to the official release of Broadwell-E processors, which was June, 2016. Broadwell-E has not been with us for very long at all.

You all raise some very good points regarding production runs of non mass production motherboards. It would be very handy if there was a kind of "emulate" generation 1 cpu option in these motherboards to enable later buyers to use online BIOS flash utility in UEFI to update to newer versions.