Hello, I also misunderstood how the FPT tool operates, and ended up flashing a stock bios file with FPT which didn't luckily brick the board, but the performance of my PC is now not great. I just changed the file extension on the stock bios file called E7B98IMS.1D0 to E7B98IMS.bin and flashed it with FPTw64 -SAVEMAC -f "nameofbios".bin. After further reading of the thread I came upon the following post, and am left wondering how to go about flashing the bios with FPT as intended to restore functionality. Apparently I need to create a complete SPI image with FITC but since I flashed the whole bios instead of trying to flash just the ME region incorrectly with FPT, I have no idea which files I need to input into FITC to build a flashable bios binary file. The motherboard in question is an MSI Z390-A PRO. Would it help if I provided an FPT dump? I cannot attach the whole bios dump FPT outputs, because of the 12MB file size restriction. The CSE ME version is reported as 12.0.70.1652, I used the tools provided for CSME version 12.

Zitat von plutomaniac im Beitrag Intel (Converged Security) Management Engine: Drivers, Firmware and Tools

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Write what to the first post? That did not solve the BIOS-related issue. You just used FPT instead of FWUpdate and in a completely wrong way. What do I mean?
a) To reflash the ME region with FPT you need an unlocked Flash Descriptor which is locked under normal circumstances so FWUpdate is needed for most people.
b) You never flash the file that I give at the first post like that via FPT. FPT rewrites the whole ME region which means both CODE + DATA. The DATA are motherboard/OEM specific settings set via FIT/FITC. FWUpdate deals only with the CODE and not DATA. If you want to use FPT, you need to download the EXTR or RGN file I provide, change settings at FITC according to your own motherboard's ME firmware and then flash it. What you just did is flash the DATA section of whatever motherboard I extracted that firmware from. Especially for mobile systems this could easily lead to a brick. For desktop, since most OEMs use similar settings, it may not necessarily lead to a brick but instabilities, disabled options and so on. Whether it results in critical failure or just weirdness it doesn't matter. The proper practice is what I described above. For FWUpdate none of these are needed as any EXTR or RGN image with any DATA is good as long as the CODE integrity is proper.
c) That FPT warning is not normal and should not be ignored. The region you tried to flash is smaller than the actual SPI ME Region. If the SPI region had any data after the size of the new firmware you could have ended once again with a bricked system. Always make sure that the FIT/FITC modified ME region you are trying to flash has the same size by adding padding manually if they are not there to begin with. Otherwise you need to use -rewrite command to completely erase the previous contents of the SPI ME Region.

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Since you have a working motherboard state, you just need to to update (Optional) the latest ME to version 12.0.85.1869

Intel (Converged Security) Management Engine: Drivers, Firmware and Tools

So are you saying it didn't configure anything incorrectly the way I did it or if it did it only affected ME and that can be fixed by updating the ME in FPT as per the instructions?

I am not trying to be rude, but I am not familiar with FPT and am new on the forum to begin with. Originally I found some posts that said you could downgrade the bios by flashing it with FPT with the command -SAVEMAC -f "biosname".bin. Then I saw what plutomaniac and Lost N Bios had written about the tool and thought that that must've not been the way to go, and I've lost some data that wouldn't be overwritten with tools such as AFU or M-Flash.

I really don't think I am having placebo here, since now I have much lower fps in games than before, and gaming in general feels off. Why it's important to me is, my motherboard is useless to me if there is something wrong with the bios that affects the PC performance, since I mainly use this PC for gaming.

We could say you got lucky...
If MAC is present, ME present in bios, ME driver installed and no issues reported from ME status in windows... dont see why not.
The SPI is, we can say its 2 different FW images, the main bios and the ME FW...the FPT tool can perform several operations to individual areas, you're not going to touch the bios updating the ME FW.
There is also the ME tools package with tools for debugging the ME

All right, actually I noticed before that apparently I have at some point wiped the MAC address, since it reads 88-88-88-88-87-88 in bios and with ipconfig /all. Somehow my ethernet is still working, so I thought it's no big deal. I only found two stickers on the motherboard itself, one on the 24pin connector with the serial number and one on top of the SATA ports, which I assume is the MAC address, 12 characters long next to a bar code, starts with 00, consists of 10 digits and 2 letters. There was no sticker under the heatsink on the actual LAN port itself. I found a package with different versions of eeupdate and tried to update it with eeupdate for I219, but the program told me no compatible adapters found. Maybe the version was too old? Device manager tells me the adapter is Intel(R) Ethernet Connection (7) I219-V. I will see about updating the ME FW next then. Meanwhile I would appreciate if someone could link the proper version of eeupdate so I could change the MAC address, if it needs to be changed.