Supermicro X11 - have you found that they ship with the 2.0 BIOS?

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Matt Lund

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Oct 20, 2016
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I'm considering purchasing an X11 board with an Xeon E3 v6 processor which is supported by the MB with a BIOS update. The trap I'm trying to avoid is the situation where the MB ships with the earlier BIOS and won't be able to boot it because I don't have a spare E3 v5 part to bring it up for a BIOS update... So I'm hoping it ships with the v2 BIOS...

Have any of your purchased a new X11 recently and if so did it ship with the v2 BIOS? Thx!
 

K D

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Dec 24, 2016
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Bought 2 x11 boards and both shipped with an older bios.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 

cliffr

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Apr 2, 2017
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It's a crapshoot. Most are sill V1 but newer will be V2. Too bad you can't see it on the stock.
 

Stephan

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Apr 21, 2017
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IMHO any board stocked is most certainly pre-2.0. Either you buy an IPMI-version, get a license code for 20 bucks (or an eval code for free?) and then flash the BIOS over the network, or you can return the board to RMA for upgrade, or like me you can use a Skylake Celeron G3900 (BX80662G3900) for 33 bucks to upgrade the BIOS and then swap out the CPU.

The update process is awkward though (DOS boot disk...) but required, because through some magic values the FreeDOS boot disk enables update of Intel ME, which is otherwise locked. I.e. don't get smart and try to update under Windows using AFUWIN5x64 %1 /P /B /N /K /R or similar.
 

K D

Well-Known Member
Dec 24, 2016
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As long as yu have access to a V5, the Bios update is a very painless process. Of course the 20$ license makes it even easier. Some one on the forum confirmed that you can update without an installed cpu or ram
 

Stephan

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Apr 21, 2017
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Incidentally for X11SAT boards BIOS 2.0b was released yesterday. I used an old SD card (128MB) via USB card reader to upgrade, using Rufus to init the SD card with FreeDOS. Then extracted the Supermicro ZIP to SD root folder, boot from it, run flash <updatefile>, reboot and boot from it a second time, and presto. Most important bug fixed should be the AMT authentication flaw, which let basically anyone log into AMT (by submitting a zero length password hash).
 
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jppowers

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May 25, 2017
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I just got my X11SSH-LN4F which I ordered from NewEgg. Received it Tuesday (June 20, 2017), built it Thursday and fired it up Friday. It had 2.0 on it. I did the update to 2.0a just to be safe but it worked with my Kaby Lake E3 out of the box.
 
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