H470I Aorus with Intel i5 11400. Issues.

[StoleMyOwnCar]

I'm making a mini-ITX build for my bedroom, and I managed to snag an AORUS H470I PRO AX for $144, open box at Microcenter, along with an 11400 for $170. They told me at the store (despite my skepticism) that all of their motherboards should be flashed to support the latest version. Well, when I got home and tried to power everything on in a test bench-esque setup, it failed to even display anything on screen with the iGPU outs. After looking around online, I found that I could flash this board without a CPU installed if I used the Q-Flash. So I did just that, Q-Flashed it with the latest BIOS. Which... by the way, the latest BIOS for this, which makes it support 11xxx series CPUs, was released 3 days ago, as I found out. Skepticism proved right.

I was able to get into the EFI, however trying to enable XMP profile for my G-Skill Ripjaws (also open box) 3200 kits kept failing. Didn't matter if I used known working ones from my main rig or not, it just would not run XMP. After some more re-flashing to get back into the EFI and some more reboots I just decided to keep them at non-XMP.

After I did that, I tried shoving my older M2 SSD in there and then booting into the flash drive I had my windows 10 install on. It accidentally booted into the windows I already had on said drive because I forgot to change boot order, and I saw the login screen. Thinking "yipee yay, at least it's working"... for all of 10 seconds before it immediately rebooted. And it kept doing that every time it got to the login screen. When I switched boot priority to the flash drive, it restarts as soon as I get to the windows install screen. It basically can't get into any software gui interface without crashing. Removing 1 ram stick seems to make it sometimes able to stay stable for longer, and the amount of time before the reboot seems to vary slightly.

At this point, the only thing I haven't tried is using a dedicated GPU to see if the crash is iGPU related, but I'm betting on their bios code just being very rushed and possibly faulty. I've never had an Intel CPU come in DOA and everything else about the system stayed pretty stable (although the idle temp in the EFI was 48c for the processor, which is pretty high, but then again I was using stock cooler... I doubt it was overheating in a simple gui). I'm going to be exchanging this tomorrow for another motherboard, but I figured I would leave a topic here to ask if anyone had any other ideas as to what might be the issue.

 

[StoleMyOwnCar]

I swapped it for an ASRock Z590M-ITX/ac. The price difference was about 20$ considering (depends on Microcenter, I guess) some of them give you a bundle deal even with open box items but this one does not, so I ended up just basically getting the 20$ price difference that I didn't get last time so only paid 20$ out of pocket for a newer MB. Booted up into my old windows installation just fine. XMP works no problem.

Guess there are always just caveats to "yeah it works with the newest CPUs, we swear", huh?

I'm a little miffed, the build quality is definitely worse on this board, and the network chip is some weird brand I've never heard of till now (haven't built a PC in a while), as opposed to an intel one. I hope it'll work fine... Guess this is case closed for this issue. CPU seems fine as expected.

 

[pendragon1]

seems like a run-of-the-mill low end mobo. id make sure to get some airflow over the vrm area but it should run fine at stock. google says it has dual nics, a 2.5Gb realtek and an intel 1Gb. if so, realtek isnt a "weird" brand, theyve been around for quite a while.

 

[StoleMyOwnCar]

seems like a run-of-the-mill low end mobo. id make sure to get some airflow over the vrm area but it should run fine at stock. google says it has dual nics, a 2.5Gb realtek and an intel 1Gb. if so, realtek isnt a "weird" brand, theyve been around for quite a while.

Yeah I tried to put a fan over there, but there's just not much I can do in a mini-itx case. I might try buying a few of those small adhesive heatsinks later. Unfortunately Gigabyte just doesn't have their stuff together in the firmware department, apparently. Or perhaps the motherboard was "open box". Either way, had to "downgrade" to a lower end newer gen board. I think it's absurd how they're charging so much for tiny mini-itx boards. This is the least expensive one I could find, and it's a "Z" type but I'm pairing it with a non-overclockable CPU. I think I still made out with a good deal, just... bleh.

I think I read "Dragon" something or other for the network chip and assumed it was some weird knockoff brand they were going with to save money. They should just name it "Realtek something or other".

 

[chameleoneel]

From what I have seen: 10 series CPUs work great on the new 500 series boards. But taking 11 series CPUs backward to 400 series mobos, results in lowered performance and sometimes outright buggy.