by “BIOS freezes” I mean “you can get into the BIOS display, click Setup and then nothing happens and the machine becomes unresponsive.” that’s how I received it from Amazon. it would still let you boot from a drive, so I installed Windows, that worked fine, used Minisforum’s utility to update the BIOS to the December version on the website, and now you power it on, the hard drive light goes on and never turns off, and that’s it. black screen, no display, no responsiveness. do I have a lemon?
how long did you give it to retrain the ddr5? maybe pop out one of the dimms, and give it like 10 mins to retrain?
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so I had never heard of “training” for DDR5 before, thanks for that. I’ll leave it on while I’m out to dinner. a second board - I have four - is exhibiting exactly the same behavior so maybe this retraining thing is what’s going on.
welp, I tried that and it’s in exactly the same state as it was before. any ideas why two boards would fail in this exact same way? or is there something else obvious I’m missing here?
gotta be a buggy bios update, I guess. did you try the one dimm thing? just leave one dimm in and see if behavior is the same?
I misspoke, sort of – the second one started in the same condition that the first one was after I ran the BIOS update on it. haven’t tried a BIOS update on the second one yet because it never POSTs. am trying it with one DIMM slot occupied – the closest to the CPU – right now and will report back after 20 min.
so it started out not turning the power light on. when I checked it again 20 min later the power light was on but there was still no video out.
What ports are you trying, have you tried using a dedicated GPU
I don’t have one here; these machines are intended to be homelab nodes. the first machine did actually show me video out of the HDMI port until I flashed the BIOS.
Have you tried removing the cmos batter to force a default bios load and mandatory relearn of everything?
Could it be bad ram, are you using same sticks or do you have a different kit for each
different kit for each. @thetazman not yet but after I finish building the third node if the same thing happens I guess I’ll try that
I’d try swapping kits with working units
Might not be it but good to narrow down options
unfortunately there are no working units yet.
update: on top of other problems I seem to have a bad monitor. but the second node is now doing something the first one was doing before it stopped working entirely: pick any option in the BIOS and it freezes with the hard drive light stuck on.
What drive? That might be a pcie compat issue.
Id probably make a bootable live Ubuntu USB drive and see if that works consistently
so, having done some more testing: it looks like there is a problem with the 10GTek 10G dual-port NIC I installed. with that card in the PCIe slot, going into Setup in the BIOS freezes the BIOS. without it, you can get into it. also with it installed it takes a really long time to POST, but it will eventually and will let you boot.
very weird behavior that reminds me of when you could get those 10G NICs on eBay or Amazon for $30 that had been pulled out of old Dell or HP servers, but they had an SMBus pin that’s usually blank on desktop cards that you had to scratch off if you wanted it to work in a non-rackmount server machine.
what I don’t know is whether changing NICs will fix the problem or if this board just hates 10G networking for some reason.
It’s probably option rom related if not the smbus thing. This bios is so limited but if you had the option to disable efi rom, or explicitly enable netboot, so it does fully load the option rom, maybe that’ll do it. Maybe it’s in no man’s land of efi bootstrapping
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