I got 8 of them for a mini cluster project, the packing was great (InstaPak foam is fantastic!) and the seller is very responsive.
Unfortunately, five were bad with basically the same symptoms as others report, with three variants:
- BMC init / 06 message and then no video thereafter, eventually green rear light turns amber after fan slow, fast for a bit, then slow again
- same sequence, but with no video ever
- no fan or video no matter how many times I tap / hold the power button, the only light ever is a green LED near the BMC chip, presumably BMC heartbeat light like on a Supermicro board
The full good boot sequence seems to be (roughly)
- BMC init message (this can last for a while - I timed it at 1:21 with nothing connected to the BMC)
- Chipset init message (this immediately replaces BMC init message, and can also last for 20 seconds or so as well)
- graphical splash screen with text messages - press DEL here to get into BIOS so you can reset settings, fix boot order, etc.
I did not flash BIOS or BMC firmware on my good boards yet, but once I set BIOS to defaults and changed the boot order to a USB stick, I was able to run memtest on all of them with no issues.
Here are some potentially interesting points from my testing and comparing good boards to bad:
- I visually compared the good boards to the bad ones and the jumpers are all identical.
- One good board had a BIOS password on the list @dstanding posted, which I was able to clear
- The good boards will run on just one stick of ECC Reg or ECC unbuffered
- The good boards will actually run with no RAM to the point of displaying a message about no RAM detected!
- The rear light that eventually turns from green to amber on bad boards also turns from green to amber eventually on good boards, so it is (hopefully) not an indicator that something is wrong
- CMOS reset / battery removal overnight did not seem to effect my bad boards in any way, but it's still worth a try
- I even tried installing a low power PCIe video card in the bad board which does not give any video, but does go amber. No video on the card either, and the heatsink on the video card didn't warm up appreciably after a few minutes, so it may not even be getting initialized.
Other notes of interest:
For my test bench, I use desktop PSUs. My first generation Xeon D Supermicro board is picky about power supplies, and will not start when powered by some 80+ desktop PSUs. A few other boards I have also seem to be picky about active PFC PSUs, but I have an old inefficient passive PFC PSU which seems to start any board which doesn't like 80+ PSUs, so I used that PSU for all of my testing above.
I wonder if this is just a batch with a high failure rate, or something like the BMC flash chip death problem on some Asrock Rack boards, or something like the Atom C2000 series issue.