Received my boards today. Had about 1 hour to play, type this up and then I had to get back to work.
Came well packaged, in a Corsair Carbide 175 chassis box, each board in a silver anti-static bag, tape wrapped in bubble wrap. More bubble wrap around both and then well packed with bubble wrap in the box. Nicely done
@MONTREAL-COMPUTERS.
@BlueFox is correct SIL/CP2104 uart bridge.
Serial BIOS settings 115200, 8, n, 1
Board takes a while to heat up, the post display will display 3 for a while, eventually fans spin up and go.
BIOS has a password. I tried: password, Password, admin, ADMIN, no joy.
I performed a clear cmos which reset the date to 4/8/2018 (screen shot shows a different date as it was pre cmos clear)
BIOS still has a password. You can get into the BIOS with reduced functionality - just can't change anything.
Both of my boards are set to UEFI boot from the network.
I did not mess around with the IPMI network interface as I ran out of time.
SFF-8643 is labeled PE_SSD_0_3_2 and IIRC 0_3_1 - I think the PE is the clue that this is indeed NVME.
Front panel connector seems to be wired standard asrock, power LED lights up, didn't test HDD LED, Reset and Power switch seem to have no effect which is I guess expected.
Rear Reset buttons work as expected.
Board dimensions are 12"x13" so basically EATX/SSI-EEB etc. etc. etc. Standoffs "look standard" but I'm not close to trying to mount this in a chassis so IDK. I counted qty 4 4-pin Fan connectors along the front of the board (towards drive bays), I did not look carefully so could be 5.
Top of the motherboard being where ATX power plugs in, that is also the half of the board for Node 1.
I only started off with Node 1 as I need to dig out a psu with dual 8pin or a splitter from the box of cables.
Used 32GB PC4-2400T sticks. Seems to be fine.
10Gbe reports as Intel X550 series specifically X552
I tried booting with a MEMTEST86 bootable USB - didn't appear in the boot list which was all UEFI Network adapter and can't be changed without password.
I know
@MONTREAL-COMPUTERS said these were returned because they would not fit in a SM chassis, but other than the top left hole it looks like this should fit in the typical SM 826/836/846 though a nylon standoff may be needed for the top left hole.
Just thinking out loud an 826 with the NVME/A backplane, a couple of m.2 SFF863 adapters might be interesting to get all 4 NVME's in trays, reverse SATA to SFF-8643 for 4 drives per node, maybe a rear SSD trays or velcro for a boot disk for each node.
Since I tried the clear cmos (about a 5 minute wait and the date did change I think that was successful) I am now wondering if the BIOS password is written somewhere else on this board... UEFI area maybe?
@MONTREAL-COMPUTERS any chance you know someone you can call to get the BIOS password? It would save us some time trying to get past that?
some images attached:
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