I recently purchased two BD790i Motherboards from Minisforum. They both will not hold their CMOS settings for more than 5 min without ac power connected. Has anyone else seen this issue? I’ve tried multiple different psus, and I’ve take some voltage readings from the battery, the battery connection pins and the CMOS clear switch which all read the expected 3.3v so the battery isn’t bad. Any ideas? I contacted support but they just jumped to RMA thinking the CMOS battery is dead based on some Chinese I translated from their email. I don’t want to RMA these if this is a design flaw, I’d rather just return them outright.
1 Like
Just joined to say I have the same issue with the board I got yesterday. Am worried about the stability of the board too, Its a shame as it is a unique pieve of tech. Low power and high performance. Am still testing it out but if anyone else could chime in with the same board and how it working for them.
2 Likes
This is interesting. I have a BD790i too, but my problem is different: mine doesn’t boot with an m.2 fitted - and once it’s removed the CMOS is reset. I have emailed them but cpnxp has just prompted me to translate the Chinese in the email…
oh 
I just got a ‘Thanks, sincerely Minisforum support’. So I guess they just forgot to switch to an English signature.
1 Like
Interesting, what kind of M.2? I’ve had two in mine and never had any issues. One was a Samsung PM9B1 256Gb for an OS drive and a SK hynix Platinum P41 2TB both work as normal and are both PCIe 4.0 x4. I also had a Connectx4 Lx 40Gb Nic in the 16x slot. As for the email I translated, they replied to the response from ‘engineering’ but changed the To field to my email, which they probably weren’t supposed to do, given they refused to elaborate on the issue when I pressed them.
I am using 3 different NVMe drives with mine, a 512GB Samsung 950pro, 2TB Sabrent (both for OS testing) and 4TB Crucial as the 2nd drive. All worked in variety of combos. But am finding inconsistent load times on the secondary (non OS, Crucial) drive. Something seems very ‘beta’ to me with this board, am seeing some odd behaviours between Win 10 and WIn 11, various things like when using UXTU for on-the-fly APU changes it sometimes just shuts down within a few seconds of setting adjustement (just small changes like max temp, so now use from BIOS to set max pwer draw etc)
So I’ve had a chance to try a few different things. It looks like the CMOS storage is a separate issue for me - with no PCIe or NVMe devices I get the behaviour of not saving settings over AC power removal - the CR2032 voltage is a healthy 3.3V.
I’ve successfully had a quad-gigabit card in the PCIe x16 slot so that seems fine for me. I don’t have anything that boots successfully in the NVMe slots. I’ve tried a Samsung 990 Pro and a Crucial P3 Plus - both individually (in each slot) and together.
I’m wondering if this is some kind of power configuration issue - one thing I tried was installing the PCIe card while the system was shutdown, but still AC connected - this resulted in the PSU hiccupping and refusing to start.
Feels like I’ve reach the point of no more easy debugging.
Hi there,
please forgive for latching onto this posting, but, I have a similar problem and thought it would fit nicely under the topic.
I also have a BD790i and was eager to try it with PCIe 5.0 SSDs. In my case these are two Seagate Firecuda 540 (1TB).
I have installed Proxmox with a ZFS RAID1 and started to notice weird slowdowns (unpacking packages from apt took ages, for example). This was not at all what I was expecting from blazing fast PCIe 5 SSDs … so I took a deeper look.
After some testing it was clear that the condition would always manifest at the “inner slot” (the one near the CPU, for lack of a better explanation):
As you can see from the spreadsheet, I’ve tested any of the two SSDs in any of the two slots, either with both slots populated or just a single slot. Every test was conducted at PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0 LnkSpeed.
This led me to the conclusion, that the fault must be with the NVMe-slot, not the SSDs.
I have contacted Minisforum about it, so far they just suggested a BIOS update. The system already came with the suggested BIOS.
Here is an example of my testing and the errors I saw:
Same SSD (see serial column) at PCIe 5.0 LnkSpeed in the “outer” slot:
This is 100% reproducible at any time.
Did anyone else see similar effects? Maybe someone tested different SSDs and had better luck? Any input would be appreciated.
1 Like
Support went quiet for about a week for me, so I emailed them again. They didn’t suggest any troubleshooting steps (for either the lack of BIOS settings persistence, or my NVMe problems). I’ve now been passed to, I guess, the returns team to process something - they haven’t said if they expect it to be a repair or a refund.
I don’t suppose anyone on this thread also has the BD770i and has noticed any differences between the two boards?
I had the BD770i for a short period of time. It didn’t have the BIOS persistence issues I’m having with the BD790i.
I only had the BD790i and that one had the BIOS persistence issue, although I was more concerned with the NVMe errors.
I was able to convince them that the board is faulty, as I clearly showed that it was always the inner slot that produced the errors at the advertised PCIe5 speeds.
The board went on its way today and I am not sure if they will replace/repair or refund it.
Repair seems not possible to my laymen’s understanding as it would seem that the silicon of the CPU ist faulty.