Supermicro X10SAT - Onboard Graphics not working with iGPU

Hi All, I think I may have broken my X10SAT, 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So I guess the manual is out of date and for some reason Super Micro got rid of the Graphics Configuration section. Great job Guys, Thanks.

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?

I have an update here in case anyone else ends up in the same situation.

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.

Turns out that when the board couldn’t access the iGPU on the E3-1285L V4 and I installed an add on 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 PCIe graphics card installed. Since Supermicro apparently removed all the graphics settings from the BIOS menu I had no way to see this or do anything about it.

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Is there a way for me to upload the BIOS I got from Supermicro here in case anyone else needs it?

It is in the form of a zip file. The upload function seems to only allow me to upload images.