It has the board spacing for it, so it should have been just included standard. You could find BIOS sockets on Digikey and just solder those on if you wanted to.
I HATE Gigabyte now.
They stated for the F5f BIOS that my new Xeon V2 CPU was supported. Little did I know it would boot loop as soon as I put it into the machine.
Put the old Xeon V1 back in and all was fine again, but I am NOT using a Sandy Bridge again because of rapid degradation.
What was the big difference between Revision 1.0 and 1.1 of this board that it causes BOOT LOOPS!?!
I now have a processor with no functioning motherboard to use it on. RMAing a used board is useless cause the warranty period has passed,
Only solution? No more Xeons. I have to get a 4960x to trade my Xeon. Trying to get another mobo is impossible.
Well⌠This whole story made me lost made me lost all trust in Gigabyte. Take the ECC support for example: On the site and on the Box, its cleary written ECC support for xeon proco. But unfortunately, its only written in the manual that the board only support Unbuffered ECC⌠nice com Gigabyte.
Iâve also have talk with engineer from Gigabyte for my loop problem and they were unable to either understand the problem or give me any cue for it⌠The lack of support from them is quite bad.
I feel you man, sorry for your loss, but the result is the same for me : no more Gigabyte in my rigs or in my customer rigs.
just found this thread! it is kinda funny it is still alive. I have the same bootloop. Actually it is no a loop. it just freezes on the screen the OP posted at first post. I have this mother board for 2 years now. At first i had only the XEON 2670 and i had this problem. I could manage randomly to get into the bios after many reboots, holding power button, PSU button etc. i never understood when it works and when not.
Then i got a 3930K and everything was working fine until yesterday⌠the CPU is dead after some idiotic OC experimentationâŚ
So i am back to my XEON since this is my main working and gaming rig. Got macOS mojave for work and windows 10 for gaming on it.
Back to XEON means back to bootloops!
This time the board refuses to boot, or reflash bios from backup bios, but still i can manage it by replacing CPUs, I7 and back to XEON. Then it boots straight to windows (this is where i am now) but if i press F12 on boot it starts again. I need to change some settings in bios in order for macOS to work.
The situation is crazy!!
Finally i saw that the revision 1.1 of this mobo has a beta F5f bios which supports E5 XEONs !! at least that is what the GA website says. (https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-X79S-UP5-WIFI-rev-11#support-dl-bios)
Could this be the whole problem? That rev 1.0 does not officially supports E5 ? But still you said that F3 bios works on with the XEON
Furthermore, would i brick the mobo if i try to flash F5f from rev 1.1??
Could you please share the link for the f3 bios? i canât find it anywhere. Still, i have a RX580 8GB would it work with f3 bios ?
i am going crazy here
What madness!! a C606 board that does not support E5 XEONS (but they are working since i am on it nowâŚ!!! )
thank you for taking the time 
Is your Xeon a V2? The Revision 1.0 version of this board electrically doesnât support the V2 Xeons. If it isnât, all you need is the F4 BIOS.
The Beta F5f BIOS also runs on Revision 1.0, but because the V2 Xeons are electrically different, it has that instant boot loop. The mobo has dual BIOS for a reason, so just donât flash over your backup BIOS.
Just flash the F4 BIOS, that one supports Xeons.
Hey man!
no it is v1. I was almost certain that OP has a v1 too.
Anyway, this thread got me working overtime and i think i finally made it!
I was on F4, but boot was always trying to open bios (with the XEON plugged in, i7 didnât have such problems) and got stuck at the Blue Gigabyte screen (op has it). I had flashed F4 over and over again trying different methods (@Bios, Qflash etc) but only the first boot was succesfull. after that either i had to avoid going into bios or i got the blue GA screen.
So now yesterday, after writing the above, i start forum searching in deep concentration mode (:P) and i found threads about moded bios. Risky you might say but at the edge of the cliff some decisions seem less scary.
So i flashed F5c modeed bios.
It works fine, i can go into bios whenever i want and PC works. as should. macOS as well!.
Truth be told, on restarts booting goes smooth, after shut downs⌠it goes into bios again⌠But this is what this motherboard is all about! i am used to it after 1 year. i hust hope it doesn;t do it every single morning. For now i am happy that it boots and bios is accessible.
Sounds like one of the chips needs to be brute force flashed like what happened earlier in the thread.
Booting to BIOS rather than Windows is typically a problem if XMP is applied with this board. If it annoys you, change the Memory Boot option to the fastest one and pray you donât get a power outage. Coldboot is the slowest one and is the most likely to go to BIOS.
I disabled XMP, manually set clock to 1600 and left timings as is. I also set memory boot to Fast as well. Should i change Memory Initialization as well? (or something liek that⌠It has values for normal, Fast, Extreme etc)
i will need few mornings to test this,
thank you for the advise!
Donât change the power settings to fast or extreme, just the memory boot setting from âautoâ to âfastâ with XMP disabled. It may also be worth it to reduce the memory frequency to ensure it doesnât fail during a coldboot.
1 Like
Another thing i would like to add to this,
keep in mind that using an Xeon cpu on a X-series chipset board,
in the X79 series can be a hit or miss.
Especially if the said Xeon is an ES sample.
Gigabyte bioses were rubbish back in the X79 and X99 era anyways.
Also with boot loops always worth trying to re-seat the cpu.
@FurryJackman: ok i did as suggested (except lowering the memory frequency, although i have tried this before with no result). I also flashed F4 modded, i got a blue gigabyte screen and i immediately reflashed F5c modded.
No change. cold boots go to bios.
I believe i will try the official F5h which is the last official from GA but for revision 1.1.
@MisteryAngel: After windows boots i get great performance. In fact userbench returned a "way ahead of the average " for the CPU.
Nevertheless, obviously you are right since bios F5h officially declares Xeon E5 support. And it is a beta⌠So it is like they admit rev 1.0 does not support E5 series while E5 support is in the uncertain sphere of a beta release.
Another new behavior (after i upgraded to F5c) is that while macOS boots perfect, win 10 take about 2 min of loading screen till they finally load. although minor, since i boot to windows only 1-2 times per week for gaming, i canât really get. I played with several bios settings but with no luck.
1 Like