Need help with Supermicro LGA 1366 Board

[sactoking]

I've been using a headless Unraid setup for several years now, primarily as a local Plex server. The hardware has started to crap out (old AMD Athlon proc) so I stepped up to something a bit beefier. On some recommendations I ended up with 2 Xeon 5670s and a Supermicro X8DT3-LN4F board. I swapped out the old case for something that could handle the eATX board (and had a lot more air movement, especially on the drives) and changed to a new PSU, on account of needing 2 4+4 CPU plugs.

After some minor trial and error getting the hardware setup I plugged it in (headless) with the Unraid boot USB and it did not boot. I remembered that some boards require a BIOS edit to make USB bootable. I powered down. I did not buy a PCI video card since I run this headless. The Supermicro board does have onboard video but it is VGA only. I only have one monitor and it only supports HDMI. I ended up pulling my Radeon R9 390 from my daily use desktop and popped it into the board's x16 PCIe slot. I plugged everything back in and powered on. No video signal.

Here's where I'm at a loss. I'm getting no video signal from the 390. I don't have a VGA monitor around to test with the onboard video. When I power it up all of the case, CPU and GPU fans start up. The GLAN port I use has a Link LED showing 1gbps connection. The BMC Heartbeat LED blinks properly. The Onboard Power LED is green. The SAS Activity LEDs are on. About 30 seconds after power on I get 4 beeps of varying lengths, then nothing. The manual only lists 4 beep codes, none of which are 4 tones.

Short of tracking down a VGA monitor (and possibly a PS/2 mouse and keyboard, since I know some older stuff can't handle USB I/O unless it's booted into an OS) what can I try? I don't have a second PCI vid card on hand, and I know the 390 works. The only other thing I can think of is that I ordered RAM before I read the manual and purchased 2 DDR3-1600 DIMMs. I know the board is rated up to 1366 but the 1600 should just downclock. I did see in the manual that the RAM population chart indicates DIMMs in multiples of 3.

 

[kithylin]

Supermicro 1366 motherboards by default only output video on the onboard VGA port, even if you have a video card installed. You have to actually connect a monitor to the onboard VGA port long enough to get in bios and initially configure to output video to the PCIE-16x slot. I understand you intend to use it headless later and that's fine. But during the initial setup you have to use the VGA port.

If you have a HDTV, some HDTV's have a VGA port on the back you can use if you can find a cable somewhere cheap. Check out good will / thrift stores. they usually have VGA cables for like $5 or less.

Also these motherboards do support booting to USB just fine. But you have to have the USB device connected when you power it on and you have to get in to bios and configure the boot menu to tell it to boot to the usb stick. It won't do that by default either.