x870i Long Post Time / Unable to Save BIOS Changes / Proceed Past BIOS

[jlarimore]

So, I am setting up a new build for my mom. This computer must be small and live in a totally unventilated tiny cabinet. So, I am trying to keep it small and very low power/heat.

My config:
x870i Motherboard
8600g AMD processor
64GB G.Skill RAM
2TB Sabrent Gen5 SSD
Onboard GPU

My symptoms are that when I boot up, it takes ~90s and then the machine finally posts. I can get into the BIOS from there. If I make any changes to BIOS or try to update the BIOS, the changes either fail to save or are erased prior to the next boot cycle. The boot cycle seems to indicate the lights cycling from CPU to DRAM to VGA holding on DRAM for the majority of the time. This cycle of CPU > DRAM > VGA cycles 3 times before finally posting and allowing me into BIOS. It is not possible to proceed past the BIOS and install Windows. If I just allow things to boot and try to install off a USB stick, I am left on a black screen indefinitely. If I hit F12 during bootup and point to the USB stick, I am left on a black screen indefinitely.

Talking to Gigabyte support, I was able to update the BIOS of the board from F1 to F4b using the USB stick without going through BIOS. The BIOS update has not altered boot up behavior at all. Looking at the boot behavior, it seems to spend a huge amount of time on the DRAM portion of the boot cycle. At first I thought this was due to a memory incompatibility with the G.SKILL sticks I bought. But, I have since tried different RAM and the support rep thought it was highly unlikely that both sticks of RAM would be bad and even if they were that it would cause this behavior. Doing more research, I guess this time to memory train is expected and that if I am never successfully cleanly booting up, it is probably just doing the memory training every single boot up.

The support rep sort of indicated it might be time to send the brand new board back. It is a 1.0 rev and I guess there might be something wrong with the first run. But, before I send it back, has anyone seen behavior like this? Is the 8600g the culprit? I have no other means of swapping that out currently to test it.

[jlarimore]

Congratulations Gigabyte. You now hold the crown for the stupidest move I've ever seen from a hardware manufacturer. Looks like the PC speaker pins are also the CMOS reset pins. So, if you dare to hook up your PC speaker, your BIOS will constantly reset on each boot. Fun times.

[dmdilks]

So what you are saying is if you have that little speaker connected to right pins. Some how it effects cmos pins? So you are not going like what I'm going say. But if you connected the speaker to the wrong pins don't blame Gigabyte.

Once you took the speaker off does it work now? Yes that was a bad place to put the two sets on pins together. But you dealing with a very small board. The last time I use one of those little speakers was like 10 yrs ago. It sits in draw with the other 200 or 300 of them. Most AMD boards have the 4 LED lights to troubleshot the board.

Yes everybody does make mistakes. I have made many of them in the pass 45yrs with computers too.

[jlarimore]

No, I'm saying the provided speaker has a 4-pin female connector on it. If you plug it into the 4 pins marked speaker on the board you are actually triggering both the speaker and the cmos reset. My guess is that the cmos reset was actually supposed to be a button. But, due to some kind of insane engineering miscommunication or mistake the cmos reset was instead tied into the speaker pins. Seems impossible. But, I ran across a reddit thread where someone, somehow figured this out. He pointed out that you can actually see the mistake diagramed out in the digital motherboard manual.

[dmdilks]

How old is the computer case I haven't see a 4 pin speaker plug on any case for over 10yrs. Almost all computer cases come with a small speaker with 2 pin plug. There is no mistake if you look at the digital manual it has #'s to show which is which.   

On one page it points out which is the speaker and which is the cmos with arrows point to them. On the another page is show #12 is the speakers & #19 is to CLR_Cmos.

Yes some board come with a CLR_Cmos button. The only button on this board is to do quick flash of the Bios.

[jlarimore]

The case is an old ITX Lian Li case. (My first ITX build maybe 14+ years ago) But, I don't think this pc speaker is related to the case. I thought it came from the new motherboard. But, i couldnt swear to it. If you're telling me it didn't come with this motherboard, I guess there is a non zero chance it got mixed in from the prior build that was removed from the case. Still pretty wacky to put the pins for cmos reset and speaker all in a perfect row like that, inviting something like this to happen. Not surprised that I'm not the only one this has happened to. Might be nice if BIOS could warn the user, "hey, you've reset the BIOS 2000 times in the last 10s. Something might be wrong. Please check the jumpers."