MSI has been forced to deploy an emergency BIOS fix for its latest graphics cards.
Long-term product reliability is undoubtedly one of the most delicate issues for hardware manufacturers. However, for Taiwanese company MSI, the problem occurred at the "very beginning of the chain". Fortunately, there was nothing hardware-related and no problem with the cards, but it still looks very bad. In mid-week, NVIDIA officially launched its new GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER graphics card. As usual, the American company's partners had prepared the ground and multiple "custom" cards (designed by these partners) were released on January 24 at 3 p.m. sharp.
MSI
Alas for MSI, things didn't go quite as planned and, in fact, the problems were noticed a few days earlier when the Ventus 3X GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER had been used by numerous testers around the world. NVIDIA had sent it to certain press contacts to evaluate the new RTX 4070 Ti SUPER. Very quickly, performance problems were noticed, and despite the publication of a first and then a second BIOS, nothing was done. The problem was finally corrected the day before the launch, on January 23. Of course, it was impossible for MSI to bring back all the graphics cards that had been away for several days so that, on D-day, they could be distributed by resellers. It was also impossible to ask these stores to open the cards to carry out the update themselves.
MSI
Undoubtedly very annoyed, MSI was forced to issue an apology. On its official website, the firm refers to its " commitment to ensuring optimal graphics card performance and overall satisfaction for our valued customers ", but has no choice but to ask end-users to perform a relatively rare manipulation in the graphics card world: updating the firmware managing the card, the BIOS mentioned earlier. Fortunately, the procedure is relatively straightforward: simply download the file corresponding to your RTX 4070 Ti SUPER MSI reference, extract the contents of the archive and execute the single file thus obtained. The procedure is then automatic and very fast, but it's important that the power is not cut off while the update is in progress. To err is human, as the saying goes, but we can only hope that MSI doesn't end up with a slew of cards rendered unusable because of a botched BIOS update!
