That makes sense.The symptoms can vary widely because it depends on the kind of damage and the amount of damaged ICs.
Lets say, one of the three, the one for the 1.2V for its memory, is damaged enough and in a way to not produce any output voltage.
That would render the BMC core and logic functional, just the memory for everything else like the OS, management and GPU would not be working.
I find it likely that the BMC would indicate such an issue with fast blinking.
Possibly similar in case just the Core-voltage for the ARM-Cores inside is not being produced but the rest is there.
With more damaged ICs, it gets more likely that the BMC would not even be able to blink a LED.
If the damage is more catastrophic in nature, it could permanently kill the BMC and even further impact the board.
You can measure the output-voltages with a multi-meter and make sure if and what the case is.
I think my testing with the board is done, I'm done for the time being.
I understand your point, but this is starting to be an edge case of viability of the design. I have broken a motherboard before, but I knew the moment it happened. Screwdriver slipped on the board and knocked off a surface mounted resistor with its' weight. My bad, off to buy another motherboard.very exaggerated. NO manufacturer mounts useless tiny smd elements on they're motherboards. even if you brick off a little resistor a motherboard becomes fully/partialy unfunctional regardless of the manufacturer.
This one I find harder to swallow. I'am not exaggerating when I say the build was non eventful. Everything went smooth, nothing got dropped or bumped in a way I would've been concerned. The fact that I didn't even consider surface damage as the cause tells a lot. I did not feel that should've even been a possibility with a smooth install.
Of course the fault lies with me since I broke the damn thing, but that does not mean that the board is well designed. For crying out loud, they put three extremely fragile ICs straight under the bottom PCIe slots where cards are going to be installed mere millimeters away from them. The margin for error during installation is ridicilously small. And to add to that the way they handle the RMA's is just "You broke it". The fair way to treat this would just aknowledge the vulnerable design on part of the BMC and treat those RMA's differently.
Other server and consumer boards I've installed have all had the same level of care during install and this is the first one to break without the knowledge on when/how it happened. I even opted for Supermicro because their BIOS and IPMI implementations have been rock solid in my use. I'm just disappointed to see this sort of design. As @RageBone said, considering that you can't replace or obtain the IC's yourself, Supermicro denies RMAs, the IC's are not protected at all and placed the way they are, this really feels like a trap from consumers perspective. Not calling out any conspiracies, just a typical way manufacturers act when their product has faults they don't recognize.