I was able to reprogram an IC while it was still on the board, saved a very expensive 4k monitor.

Was skeptical with this. I had kept in mind some of the bad experiences people had using this programmer. To my surprise, and very first time ever doing something like this, I managed to get one of my older cards to work again! very happy with how things turned out :) First time users will definitely NEED to do alot of research on this thing and find guides for how to use the programmer, looking up the type of chip that the piece of hardware you are going to reprogram. its not very user friendly to the novice. note: DOES NOT COME WITH INSTRUCTIONS! So after a good solid 2 hours of research and finding the proper programs to get the programmer to run, i successfully reflashed an rx6600 hellhound after the 6th or 7th try. Patience is super key with this thing and needing to readjust and reposition the clamps so that every pin is making contact is very important. i would like to see a better cable clamp design that somewhat is identical to the lever locking mechanism so it allows a much solid connection without having to readjust the clamp constantly. Spent 10 bucks on this thing to save a $200 card. kept me from needing to spend over $130 in repairs so i am super happy with this product. Will keep on hand in case of emergency bios reflashings for cards and motherboards.

I was using it with something like vital bracelet dim cards. I did not use it to program anything PC related. There were no issues when I plugged the USB stick into my laptop. The 3.3V pin did not give me issues for the accessory I was using.

Lots of caveats here. This review is of the programmer and the SOIC8 clip. Caveat 1: I am maybe in the lower middle of what I would call End User Technical Ability... not a professional in any way... A Prosumer I suppose. I needed to erase a forgotten EFI password on a 2012 Mac Mini. I am much more experienced in modifying physically large and forgiving embedded chipsets... like arcade machines. This project was out of my league. As an example of my technical level: I did not test supply voltage which many users are reporting is locked on 5V even when set to 3.3. Oops. Hopefully that was fixed at some point. Caveat 2: I don't care about my Windows installs, one of which ran this programmer... this is important because my hunt for drivers and software was aided by untrusted websites. I believe the ASPrgrammer package from Github had the 341a drivers included, but I had already downloaded them from another less trusted source. I agree... this one's totally on me and there are safe locations to find the software. Caveat 3: The SOIC8 clip never really worked. Earlier in the week I had purchased one without the programmer for my GQ-4X and that probably didn't work (I never did get my fancy GQ-4X to interface with the MX25L6406em2 chip on the mac mini board). I does stick to the SOIC8, but the pins don't connect. after four or five times attempting to connect the plastic on the clip started deforming and it wouldn't stick to the chip at all. This happened on both my clips. The first clip I attempted to modify the plastic but ended up destroying the whole thing. The second clip... don't laugh... I swapped the spring with a thinner one to settle down the insane gripping tension this clip has, then used a series of rubber bands wrapped around the mac mini logic board and the clip to provide downward pressure and stabilize the clip. This worked great. The area around the MX25L6406 chip on the 2012 Mac Mini is populated... very close to the actual chip. To be fair this likely played a role in the SOIC8 clip not working... but if it weren't populated so closely I would have just removed the chip and programmed it directly... so apply that formula to your skill level and the project in hand I guess. Im fairly certain that the grip force of the clip is maybe 5 times more powerful than it has to be and I could have saved the plastic had I swapped the spring out earlier. Also the plastic housing of the clip is HUGE compared to how tightly stuffed modern motherboards are... this clip size is likely commensurate with the insane gripping force it has. With those caveats out of the way... I'm amazed with this programmer. Once I interfaced the EEPROM I was working on with the terrible SOIC8 clip and a complex web of stabilizing rubber bands... and got over my wife laughing at my ridiculous project, This kit - in total half the price of a SOIC8 adapter board for the fancy GQ-4X burner I own - did what my GQ-4X couldn't... it read a supported chip. I have used the GQ-4X on many many projects over the years with great success, however without buying their SOIC8 adapter that programmer refuses to tell you where to orient the pins. That programmer does have a listing for MX25L6406em2, so I'm assuming it would have worked had I figured out the pinout... a lot of work for something over ten times the price of this CH341a with the adapters included. Long review long. I was able, with some effort, to reprogram my 2012 Mac Mini Bios in situ with some persistence, research and probably luck. In doing so, if you're in my boat, I had to zero out the chip for the code to hold after booting... so the writing process after reading the firmware and rewriting it to my liking, was unlock>erase>write>verify, for which there was a scripted option in the (not included) software to do just that. Again I didn't test for 3.3V so the mod to disable 5V other reviews are citing might be necessary to avoid damage to the chip... but my chip does appear to be undamaged. This $10 kit saved my computer when my existing professional equipment could not. It did so without the risk of removing the chip from the motherboard. It gets four stars for that reason, but please have a good idea of what you're getting into.

I made a mistake a few weeks ago and flashed an incorrect BIOS for a motherboard I was using on my test bench. I ended up with a blackscreen, DEAD. Reading up on re-flashing the chip, I went with this instead of ordering a pre-written bios chip from Taiwan (which would have taken 3 weeks). It all went incredibly easy. I plugged in the chip (which looks backward with pin 1 opposite from pin 1 of the zip socket), ran the windows software. Detected, Read, Erased, Wrote, Verified. All worked perfectly. When I plugged the chip back into the ASUS motherboard it booted up with no errors. Very pleased!

This tool is vital to restoring a BIOS chip on a bricked laptop. The circuit has an error, and will give 5V to a 3.3V chip if you don't desolder and rewire the main programmer chip to use the onboard 3.3V reg. This device, as sold, has a good chance of killing your target chip. The test clip is to connect to a chip already on a board, but was assembled backwards, and also takes some soldering to fix. Someone thought I could clip from under the board? It's for surface-mount, there is no way to clip from underneath. This is a garbage product... but with those two fixes it is a valuable tool that actually did restore a bricked laptop BIOS for me. Only took a few extra hours labor. Using it and finding the binary data required is another endeavor, but not the responsibility of this programmer.

I was able to use this tool on my 2014 caprice to enable performance options and other cool features hidden within the gauge cluster. Flipped a few hex values, and i added lap timers, accelerometer, trans temp, and other cool things.

Almost all devices listed in this posting are 3.3v not 5v. So this device can not program a newer version of those devices. So if it does work it is in danger of blowing up those devices your programming. This is in part because this is off a bad original design from 5+years ago. Spend the extra $1 and get the board with the 3.3v fix on it, instead of having to spend 20 minutes of your time doing a hack to the board. Most buy this board, end up blowing up a few chips then spend the 20 minutes doing the hack. when they could have ordered the right board for $1 more.

I bricked my Alienware laptop with a bad BIOS update. Using this device I was able to flash the correct BIOS directly to the BIOS chip and bring my laptop back to life. I took 1 star off because the clamp wouldn't stay on the chip, so I had to hold it just right to get the BIOS to flash, which took several attempts.

Todavía no lo he probado pero llego todo intacto completo