Computer will not POST with new NIC installed

[mitchell13]

I have just purchased a new NIC and my computer will not boot with it installed in any of the PCIE slots.

 

system info:

600W EVGA Gold rated PSU

Asrock B660 Steel Legend

Intel i3 12100F

16 GB 3200 RAM

Radeon R7 240

2 4TB WD HDD's, 1 120 GB SATA SSD, 1 128 GB NVMe SSD

Intel 82576 NIC (specifically this one)

 

Computer boots fine/works fine without the NIC installed. When i put it into any of the slots, the EZ-debug lights on mobo show CPU and DRAM as solid red and computer will not boot. I take out the card and it works just fine. Card works OK in other computers as well

 

Steps tried:

Flash BIOS to newest version 6.04

put in every slot, with and without graphics card in

disabled mobo NIC in bios. 

put NIC in another computer and it works/is recognized as an interface

 

Please help as I can't find anything online to help me with this

[An0maly_76]

Though I wouldn't expect it with a board this new, some boards limit PCIe device support for various reasons. It's possible your board's BIOS does not support that particular NIC.

[Alex Atkin UK]

54 minutes ago, An0maly_76 said:

Though I wouldn't expect it with a board this new, some boards limit PCIe device support for various reasons. It's possible your board's BIOS does not support that particular NIC.

I've never known this on a desktop board, especially a retail model.  More likely the NIC is faulty.

[An0maly_76]

52 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

I've never known this on a desktop board, especially a retail model.  More likely the NIC is faulty.

I should think that if the NIC was faulty, it wouldn't show up or work in another machine when the other one would not boot. I had an MSI B450M that would boot with its original GT1030, but refused to boot with the GTX1650S I was installing. I've also seen on older boards where as support for newer processors was added, certain older "obsolete" or "no longer needed" support was removed to make room for the newer component support due to storage space constraints in the chips. For example, an older Gigabyte A320 with a BIOS version past F43 with a 3600 will not boot with certain PCIe devices installed, due to certain devices no longer being supported. It's not that common, but it's not altogether UNcommon, either.

[Alex Atkin UK]

5 minutes ago, An0maly_76 said:

If the NIC was faulty, it wouldn't work in another machine. I had an MSI B450M that would boot with its original GT1030, but refused to boot with the GTX1650S I was installing. I've also seen on older boards where as support for newer processors was added, certain older "obsolete" or "no longer needed" support was removed to make room for the newer component support due to storage space constraints in the chips. For example, an older Gigabyte A320 with a BIOS version past F43 with a 3600 will not boot with certain PCIe devices installed, due to certain devices no longer being supported. It's not that common, but it's not altogether UNcommon, either.

I suppose its possible some boards might only support UEFI PCIe devices, its the only thing I can think of.  Some NVIDIA cards also had an issue with their BIOS, though I think those were 3090s.

In general though, you don't need BIOS support for every PCIe device, a PCIe device is a PCIe device, that's the whole point.  It would be impractical for motherboard vendors to test every single PCIe device, that's why PCIe is a standard that any compliant card should work in.

[An0maly_76]

25 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

I suppose its possible some boards might only support UEFI PCIe devices, its the only thing I can think of.  Some NVIDIA cards also had an issue with their BIOS, though I think those were 3090s.

In general though, you don't need BIOS support for every PCIe device, a PCIe device is a PCIe device, that's the whole point.  It would be impractical for motherboard vendors to test every single PCIe device, that's why PCIe is a standard that any compliant card should work in.

I think this was more of a thing with the A320 / B450 / X370 / X470 boards. I've not heard of it with B660 / B550 / X570  and such.

[Alex Atkin UK]

40 minutes ago, An0maly_76 said:

I think this was more of a thing with the A320 / B450 / X370 / X470 boards. I've not heard of it with B660 / B550 / X570  and such.

I know they had to drop CPU support for older chips to support newer ones, that's down to the BIOS DOES need to contain microcode to support every CPU in order to POST at all.  But that's not the case with PCIe devices, initialising PCIe devices should be quite late in the POST process and it only need to know they are there and allocate them memory space.  Anything beyond that to allow basic operation before the OS loads can be put into the UEFI boot partition, its kinda what its for, to expand BIOS support via software patches that don't need to be in the BIOS chip itself.

 

Anyway, I did a quick Googling and it seems the niggling idea in the back of my mind might be the problem.  Does the card have its own BIOS and can you disable network boot in there?  This seems to have been the problem in some Intel server adapters, they try to add themselves to the boot list and some desktop motherboards don't like it and hang.  If inserted into a different PC that DOES work and network booting is disabled in the card itself, it should then POST fine.