MSI BIOS not loading properly

[badworseme]

Hi everyone, 

 

My brother built his first PC with the awesome PC building guide from LTT and is just about to be finished but has a weird issue. I suspect a faulty board but wanted to confirm. 

MSI Z690-A PRO WIFI DDR-5 board

Intel i5-12600KF CPU

2x16GB Kingston Fury Beast DDR5-4800 RAM

2TB Samsung 970 Evo plus M.2 SSD

be Quiet! Straight Power 850 PSU 

ASRock RX6800 challenger pro GPU

 

Everything purchased new and sealed. 

 

When he turns the PC on, the board cycles through the 4 status LEDs and the green one (boot) stays on. Which makes sense, as the hard drive is still without an OS. 

The Monitor shows this screen 

Keyboard input does nothing (esc, del, f1-12,arrows,enter). Tried waiting in that screen for a couple of minutes, nothing happens. All fans run at idle speed. No beeps or other flashing LEDs.

What we already did:

Reseat all cables 

BIOS jumper reset had the board do some funny stuff with the diagnosis LEDs on first boot, then auto restart and it went back to this screen. 

 

Searched Google and could only find either no graphics output at all or troubleshooting steps that involved the actual BIOS. Which this is apparently not. 

 

I was now wondering whether we should try updating the BIOS but I kind of fear voiding the warranty if we try that. Thought that So.1700 boards should get along with the 12600KF w/o a BIOS update. 

 

Should we try a BIOS update? Any other ideas? 

 

Thanks and Regards from Germany

Alex 

[WereCat]

I would personally try to flash the BIOS via USB on the motherboard with the Flash feature, you don't even need RAM and CPU to do it. This saved my bacon few times in the past on a different board with corrupted BIOS.

 

[RONOTHAN##]

I've seen this a couple a times, and when I've seen it it's been either a corrupted BIOS or incredibly unstable RAM. I'd start with a BIOS flash like @WereCat suggested, and if that doesn't work I'd start doing single RAM sticks in each slot to see if you've maybe got a faulty stick or a faulty RAM slot. 

[badworseme]

Thanks. Bios flashing did the trick 

[badworseme]

Actually the BIOS keeps crashing now whenever he opens any sub menu.

Re-flashed the same BIOS again to no avail. Windows install worked fine and windows also runs fine but no access to XMP, to fan curves, boot priority etc. 

Once more I assume a faulty board  but we're gonna wait a couple of weeks for a newer BIOS version and then try to get the board RMA'd