Help! Supermicro X10SAT - Onboard Graphics not working with iGPU

[iannet]

Hi All, I think I may have broken my Supermicro X10SAT LGA1150 Motherboard, hoping someone can help.

I have an X10SAT that has been working great for years with an E3-1265L V3 installed no issues at all. I recently got my hands on an E3-1285L V4 and figured I would give it an upgrade. The BIOS was already the current version 3.2 from 5/18/2018 and Supermicro says V4 E3 Xeons are supported. What could possibly go wrong…

I Installed the 1285L V4 the board fires up but unfortunately I get no video output, just 5 short beeps. According to the manual this is “No Console Output Device Detected” so basically no graphics device. That’s a bummer I thought, must be a bad / fake CPU.

So I install an add-in graphics card and it boots up fine and I go into bios and see the E3-1285L V4 is detected. Boot into OS still with the graphics card and everything seems to be in order. Figured it must be a bad iGPU on the new CPU, once again: Bummer. Oh well.

Remove the graphics card and swap the E3-1265L V3 back in, the one that has been working for years, and much to my chagrin 5 short beeps, no video. Uh-Oh.

So basically I no longer seem to be able use an iGPU at all with this board.

My first thought was maybe I bent some pins swapping out the CPU. I got out a magnifying glass and went over and over the socket, at least visually everything looks pristine, I couldn’t find a single pin out of place.

I installed the graphics card again and go back into setup. Maybe some setting was changed?

According to the manual there should be a section: Advanced → Chipset Configuration → Graphics Configuration which seemed like a good place to start, except that no such section exists. Under Chipset Configuration there is only:

1. System Agent (SA) Configuration
2. PCH-IO Configuration
3. On Board Chip Configuration

So I guess the manual is out of date and for some reason Super Micro got rid of the Graphics Configuration section.

I was not able to find anything at all in the bios that referenced anything to do with Graphics in general, Graphics options for boot, or iGPU options for the CPU. Nothing.

Not sure what to do from here. Does anyone here have any insight into my situation?

 

[iannet]

I have an update on this in case this is ever a problem for someone else.

It turns out I didn’t break my board, Supermicro just designed it that way, so feature-not-a-bug I guess.

I reached out to Supermicro and they sent me an unofficial beta BIOS that has the Graphics Options enabled. Sure enough the onboard graphics were disabled and the PCIe graphics card was locked in as the boot up graphics device.

It appears that when I installed a PCIe graphics card the board auto-detected the new setup and changed the settings, disabling the iGPU and defaulting to the PCIe graphics card. Unfortunately when I removed the PCIe graphics card the board did not do the reverse and simply beeped its disappointment that there was no graphics card available. Since Supermicro apparently removed all the graphics settings from the BIOS menu I had no way to see this or do anything about it.

With the graphics options enabled I was even able to get it to use the iGPU on the Broadwell CPU so all in all a happy ending. If there is a way to upload the zip file from Supermicro here I would be happy to post it in case others are in the same situation.