Gigabyte G27Q monitor bricking itself after F05 update. But not really.

As per my usual Gigabyte tradition, things just have to go wrong with their stuff… Just the other day I was updating its firmware on my Gigabyte G27Q monitor to version F5 which brings some refresh rate fixes. So, I installed OSD Sidekick, downloaded firmware and applied it.

All went well until display went blank during update and monitor began doing what looked like a bricked loop state. Its power indicator was blinking in a weird way with two fast blinks and a longer pause, making weird high pitch noise every time it blinked. Since documentation doesn’t exist on Gigabytes site apart from entirely useless “manual”, I searched online and found someone else had exact same issue on Reddit. Apparently they fixed it by having it unplugged for a day. So I went with that fix. Left it unplugged from power as well as PC (I was using DisplayPort) for the night. In the morning, all excited to finally get to the desktop I plug it in aaaaaand the same thing. Blinking LED, dead monitor. Dafaq?!

Then as I was flipping it around thinking what to try next I realized I only unplugged power, its USB and DisplayPort cables. The HDMI going to PlayStation was still plugged in and I remembered the news about HDMI dongle fooling GeForce cards into allowing mining and I thought, what if presence of HDMI cable alone (even though PlayStation was turned off) is making it fail to operate. So I entirely unplugged it from all power and data sources. Waited a minute, plugged only power cable back and behold, monitor woke up normally. I stuck back in the DisplayPort cable and bam, Windows desktop appeared with OSD Sidekick app still there saying “Finished” in a popup.

Apparently, if you have HDMI plugged in, G27Q monitor will get stuck in a “boot” loop after firmware update. And since the F05 in particular has refresh rate fixes for PlayStation 5, that happening is a very likely scenario since it connects via HDMI.

So, apparently all you have to do to “unbrick” it is to disconnect ALL cables then only plug it into power and turn it on. Once it completes the first “boot”, it will work fine even with all the cables plugged in. What an absolutely bizarre issue that will surely freak out so many users who ventured down this firmware updating route. I just hope they’ll find this blog post and resolve the issue quickly. I can’t tell you have freaked out I was thinking shiny new 300+ € monitor just got bricked and I’ll have to deal with lengthy RMA process. Thankfully I didn’t have to after figuring out the issue myself. I also hope Gigabyte will write down a warning for F05 update that if this happens you need to disconnect it entirely, do a power only “boot” and then connect things back.

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