To be fair, flashing the bios isn't nearly as bad on most modern systems.
Put the file on a USB drive, plug it in, restart and go into the bios, look for the flashing utility, select the file, done. As long as the machine is on a UPS in case of disaster, everything's accounted for.
From my experience: Better have a > 32gig USB Flash drive, everything else doesn't work (MSI) and I don't have an UPS so it's always quite an exciting experience. Especially since Motherboard Manifactures save almost a whole dollar by not having a display ouputting anything. So it's blinkenlights and hope for the best
Not just for convenience, but safety. You don't want to be caught out when something goes wrong, even without flashing the bios.
A lot of boards these days have 7-segment displays. They're not great, but they're a good step up. Don't need to spend a lot, I think they show up on $300-ish boards. Mine definitely does.
I see no need for it. Living in Germany, any kind of power outages are exceptionally rare. I remember one in the last 10 years for a few hours and that was very local. If I am in a situation where a power outage occurs, i'll listen to my battery radio for a while and be fine. I work on nothing and rely on nothing that would actually require a UPS.
It's like not having a backup drive. Everything is fine until one day it isn't.
A good UPS does more than just protect from outages. It also protects from surges and low-voltage situations that can both damage the equipment severely.
A UPS doesn't cost much and will last many years. Buying a new motherboard and GPU because they got fried is much more expensive.
Keep in mind that most equipment of this nature has universal power supplies, and thus works even at just 50% of nominal grid voltage.
The substation is mandated to trip in that anomaly, btw. Otherwise some very common types of motors (AC induction, single and 3-phase) would burn from the excessive current they draw to compensate for the reduced voltage.
My new computer takes a while to POST (z690 with ddr5 smh) so it’s basically been continuously either on or in sleep since I built it 18 months ago and I’ve had an unexpected shutdown due to power loss once in that time according to the Event log. I think the risk of losing power while flashing the bios is very small in real life unless you are stuck in a place with third world electricity infrastructure.
If POST takes a long time it’s often memory training, backing off on the timings just slightly might make it go a lot quicker. Bios updates also often twiddle knobs in this area.
Memory training can happen if the CPU detects that current timings don't work at boot. Since GP never shuts down, it's possible that his memory is always hot and performs better on a reboot (when setting new timings) than after a cold boot (this is basically always true since ram chips like to be hot but especially relevant here). If GP is using XMP or has custom timings, I'd suggest easing off on them especially considering the novelty of DDR5.
It isn’t this, it takes about a minute to train after a bios update or when I enable XMP but never trains after that. It just takes like 20-30 seconds to get all the way to the bios splash screen and only 5 seconds to return from sleep so I just use sleep instead of turning it off. Then the only time I need to wait through a boot is for windows updates.
Put the file on a USB drive, plug it in, restart and go into the bios, look for the flashing utility, select the file, done. As long as the machine is on a UPS in case of disaster, everything's accounted for.