On request of numerous users I revisited the Biostar X370 GT7, their complaint: Biostar have made zero attempt to fix firmware problems or provide a similar level of support to other motherboard manufacturers such as Asrock, MSI, etc. These are complaints of the most serious nature when I review any hardware it is my reputation that is attached to those articles so I decided to investigate the claims and complaints. After concluding my investigations the conclusion I came to is that sadly as good as the GT7 is on a hardware level the firmware is woefully inadequate, absolutely awful, not even close to the level of quality offered by other manufacturers. Still. After 1.5 years. Rest assured IF I decide Biostar are worthy of my time and a review in future I will not be giving them the benefit of the doubt as I did in the original review I wrote and published on XtremeSystems and here at Win-Raid (which you can read HERE, AND HERE) nor will this current situation with the GT7 (and X470 GT8, most of the problems I found are highly likely to apply to that board as well) be forgotten. It is rare I come across a manufacturer so unconcerned with supporting the products they sell, to name but a few of the more severe complaints I could verify is a broken Gear Down option once you set a memory frequency higher than 2400MHz causing the system to fail to POST, the system failing to display any image after the POST splash screen when switching from "Legacy" to "UEFI" from the Compatibility Support Module with a GTX980 (even a vBIOS update to the latest there is did not help), no option in smart fan control to allow the user to specify for themselves a CPU temperature limit at which any manually input or preset fan values are ignored, severely lacking memory divider options compared to other boards, the list goes on, and on, and on, and on, and on. Even after a considerable amount of time with Biostar R&D trying to get them to resolve these issues they have not, from which I can only conclude three things; 1. They do not care, 2. They are incompetent, 3. They are THE definition of disingenuous and there should be a picture of Biostar R&D next to the word "disingenuous" in the Oxford dictionary and Thesaurus.

So, to try and alleviate a lot of these troubles and woes for people being a former R&D guy I decided with @Lost_N_BIOS with some input from @barisuraz to make a highly modified firmware addressing a lot of these problems. The modified firmware is rather comprehensive in the changes we are making so be sure to check the changelog regularly. In terms of development the best I can say is that in the past 1.5 weeks or so we have made more developments, fixes, and improvements than Biostar have made over the last 1.5 years.

Given Biostars track record do not expect updates to be very often, MAYBE there will be an update for each new AGESA there is but I had to really push Biostar to even get a firmware update with AGESA 1004c to fix the serious memory divider bugs 1002a had. Shockingly it did not seem like they knew about anything I was telling them, astounding for something that is meant to be a large chunk of R&Ds job. Take that for what you will. As a former R&D guy, one of those positions being with a large memory manufacturer, I am appalled by the lack of understanding Biostar R&D have exhibited and it truly leaves me wondering how those R&D people at Biostar still have jobs.

UPDATE: 22/10/18: Nope, you aren't even going to get an updated firmware with each new AGESA update, heres the reply I got from Biostar R&D and my reply back to them of how that conversation went;

"We’ve just updated AGESA Pinncle Pl 1.0.0.4c recently. Because Pinncle Pl 1.0.0.6 doesn’t have critical improvements, so we’ve decided temporarily not update this one."

My response (which may or may not get passed to them in entirity or partial form)

"According to my sources PinnaclePI 1006 provides compatibility improvements that very much comes under the category of critical improvements. Besides that, every other manufacturer will be updating to PinnaclePI 1006 when it has passed their verification stages this I have had confirmed by multiple sources. This level of support is expected in the west, no exceptions. Failure to realise this will see yourselves never making a dent against the likes of Asrock, Asus, MSI or Gigabyte."

!!DISCLAIMER!!: Myself and LOST_N_BIOS are happy for owners of the GT7 to freely download and use this firmware however we do NOT give permission to Biostar to take the work we have done. We expect to be appropriately compensated for clearing up a lot of your mess Biostar if you want to save time and take our work.


Updated UI Design


Splash Screen




Firmware UI







You'll have to forgive this next rather crummy looking image for some reason the screen capture would not work with the clock open.




AMD PBS

Biostar completely broke this module it would appear, fixed now.




Bio-Flash Screen



Hopefully these images give you a good idea about the level of effort that was put in to the firmware itself and making the UI something much easier to look at to stop all those bleeding eyeballs.



CHANGELOG:

Necroviving... oh almighty PC gods hear our plea...

I wonder if we could modify our BIOS SKU to X470 just for bragging rights :P

I could do that but it would be easier to just replace the driver modules for the on-board LAN then you could use a full fledged GT8 firmware on the GT7 pretty much, might be a couple things I'm missing only glancing at the GT8 firmware quickly but it shouldn't be much more compliccated than that. Wouldn't be a lot of point though the GT8 is a carbon copy of the GT7 almost with the exception of a different lick of paint and different LAN chip (Biostar swapped from the Realtek Dragon to intel l211AT).

Lol can you get a GT8 insider build? It would be awesome sauce if we built the MOD BIOS on top of that. @ket

@barisuraz Biostar use a pretty much one size fits all approach to their firmware construction I've already poked around the GT8 firmware a bit to compare it to the GT7 there really are almost zero differences the biggest change is that Biostar added some extra fan options for the GT8 because.. yeah, you know, thats just what overclockers want more fan options over more overclocking options or a better laid out UI such as moving all DRAM related options and timings to one place.

@barisuraz first public release is ready if you know anyone else who has a GT7 that can test the firmware out that would help myself and @Lost_N_BIOS greatly!

@ket This firmware somehow fixed RTC showing CAD Bus settings wrong. Ryzen Master still doesn't read memclocks. My only gripe is that Precision Boost Overdrive isn't there in the settings. If you could enable it I'd be very happy with this board. Also according to rumors AGESA PinnacleRidge 1.0.0.6 is coming out this month with pretty big memory optimizations/fixes so it would be cool if you could ask your man at Biostar to release a BIOS with that AGESA asap.

@barisuraz thats an odd one I never had CAD bus settings showing incorrectly my guess would be it was to do with the module you were outright replacing rather than fixing ;). I can try to get Biostar to release some firmware with AGESA 1006 when its out but 1004c is very solid making it not as high of a priority as fixing the many issues the vanilla GT7 firmware has. I'll also look at that Precision Boost Overdrive setting.

@ket - A5E369C8-ABF9-4B43-B212-FF1BFD35666D_CbsSetupDxeZP << Precision Boost, under a suppress if (Changing the 05 and 02 at second to last byte in string of those two questionID's to FF should do it)

@Lost_N_BIOS yep I've been editing that module along with 3E77 as well ;) I'm moving options outside of those suppress constraints though as that then allows me to repurpose the suppress constraints if needed.

Never suppress only set free, set it all free!

@Lost_N_BIOS lol there are plenty of options that are not necessary and would only make things look far more complicated than they actually are for a lot of people, usability and functionality is what I focus on ;)

New updated firmware is released