Gigabyte MB10-DS3 no VGA/POST

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eroji

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Dec 1, 2015
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I got a "non-working" Gigabyte MB10-DS3 off eBay for $50 hoping to try my luck. The board arrived and looked free from physical damage. I put some Hynix DDR4-2133 ECC UDIMMs in to test it out and not surprisingly the board turns on but got no VGA output. I could not tell if it actually completed the POST. The IPMI LED lits up but did not obtain an IP via DHCP. I tried clearing the CMOS but did not get anywhere with that either.

To my surprise after probably 5+ minutes, it actually POSTed. I was able to get into the BIOS and everything looked to be in working order. However every reboot would take equal amount of time for it to POST. I removed the HSF to take a look under it and it showed the 1541 as "Intel Confidential". This leads me to believe the board is some sort of engineering sample. Other things I noticed that the board is a "rev 1.1" which I don't believe Gigabyte has ever sold it as. They only list rev 1.3 on their site. Moreover, the rev 1.3 has Intel X552 whereas this board has Cortina. I noticed that the original product announcement did state that Cortina was the chipset used. The BMC information in BIOS comes up as empty and IP I configure the BMC as is also not reachable.

I'm looking for some ideas on what if anything I can do to fix the BMC. My guess is that the slow POST behavior is also related to it.
 

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eroji

Active Member
Dec 1, 2015
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I managed to update both the BMC firmware and motherboard BIOS to the latest versions listed under rev 1.3. Both updates did not complain and it fixed the slow POST problem. However, the BMC is still not working. Both DHCP and static IP does not work. The BMC seems to fail to accept the configuration change. I also tried IPMItool under Linux and it could not find the LAN channel to set an IP.
 

RageBone

Active Member
Jul 11, 2017
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Is the BMC hartbeat blinking like it should?

Are the LEDs on the dedicate BMC nic lighting up when you connect a cable to it?
 

eroji

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Dec 1, 2015
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BMC LED is blinking. The dedicated LAN port also lights up when plugged in. After the BMC firmware flash, BIOS does show respective BMC component versions and the slow bootup issue is resolved. However, only LAN connectivity to the BMC seems to be non-functional. Changing the BMC IP configuration in BIOS then saving it only result in it resetting upon reboot. The MAC address of the BMC also shows up as 01-01-01-01-01-01.
 

RageBone

Active Member
Jul 11, 2017
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Well, good and bad news.
The BMC seems to load and probably boot the firmware, so a hardware defect hindering that is unlikely.

It seems that both, your MB10 and my MD70-HB0 behave similarly in regards to the BMC.
My suspicion is a dead realtek Nic controller, but i haven't investigated that, but the Nic Leds lighting up is pointing away from it.
 

eroji

Active Member
Dec 1, 2015
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From what I can see, it does not appear to be a dead NIC. However I think there is some sort of mismatch between the retail BMC firmware and board BIOS combination vs what is needed for this non-retail board to be fully function, which sucks because it's likely I won't be able to find a fix or get Gigabyte to provide any info or instructions on how to resolve the BMC issue. Nonetheless, the board did only cost me $50, which is an insane steal for a Xeon-D 1541, with the only downside of not having IPMI.