Flashing before you even get started?

[Dogsbestfriend]

Hi got an Asus P5k-wm motherboard on the way so I can finaly put together my new rig. I called Asus to confirm a few unrelated items about thier board and I double checked my brand new QQ6600 quad core chip would work and I would told it would but may require a bios update to do so. So how do a fire up a PC to flash the bios LOL without a CPU? I know this may sound like a nub question but out of the few times I've had to flash my bios I had already had a working pc.
What do I do? How do I check the bios version of the motherboard that is not in an operational PC?
-Thanks

[gvblake22]

Well, the first step would be to at least see if the board will boot with the Q6600. Sometimes it will at least boot enough for you to flash the BIOS. I was in a similar situation a while back when the new Athlon64 Venice core came out and many people said it required a BIOS flash. I was lucky enough to find that the older BIOS version on my board would still boot up and run and I then flashed the BIOS with the new processor installed (because I didn't have another processor to use instead).

But if that doesn't work, then you will probably need to get a hold of an older LGA775 processor that will boot in the board. Try going to a local computer shop and see if they will let you just fire it up with their hardware to flash the BIOS. Your last option would probably be to just RMA the board to Asus for a BIOS flash/update.