Yesterday I updated to the new 0083 BIOS (from 0070) and immediately I noticed problems on the first fresh boot. First off, as others have reported the power light just blinks all of the time as if the system were asleep. Secondly, after the first successful boot it would subsequently get stuck in a POST loop upon being powered on. The system would power up, it would begin POST, but would then not even get to the presentation of the access hotkeys (F2 to enter BIOS, F7 to update BIOS, etc.). Yes, I did load the system defaults from within both the visual BIOS and the classic BIOS immediately after updating the BIOS, so lingering settings couldn't have been the problem.
I was eventually able to get back to the point where I could flash from a USB stick back to version 0070 by using the back-to-BIOS button on the rear panel of the mobo and just waiting through 6 or 7 reboot loops until it finally let me get into the BIOS update utility. I flashed it back to 0070, loaded defaults again, but it still does the same thing now!!! After at least 50 unsuccessful boot attempts, I can now get it to boot roughly half of the time if I remove one of my DIMMs and leave it in single channel mode. Maybe half...
Memory is Kingston KHX1600C9D3K2/8GX. CPU is Core i5-3750K. And no, I never do any overclocking. This machine is a workstation. It is for work.
If this were the beginning of my troubles, I wouldn't be so upset. But this is the fifth MAJOR problem I have had with this board since purchase. The first set of Corsair modules I purchased would not POST on this board (three beeps) even though they worked in every other system I tried them in and they passed memory integrity checks. The second set is the Kingston DIMMs mentioned above, and I had to manually set them to 1600Mhz if I wanted them to run them faster than 1333. Again: they worked fine in the other boards (Asus, Gigabyte) I tried them on. Then I found out that the front panel USB 3.0 header just doesn't work on ANY of these boards. At all. Lovely. Worked diligently with Intel support to arrange to have my board shipped back to them so their engineers could take a look at it, going OUT OF MY WAY to work with their support staff, doing an amount of troubleshooting that no rational entity could possibly expect an end user to do. This was tens of hours of work in troubleshooting and eliminating possible causes. And after that I finally got them to agree to cross-ship me a replacement only to then be ignored for almost a FULL MONTH before they randomly contacted me out of the blue saying "oh hey, you ready to ship us that board now". You can imagine my response. Polite but seething.
And now this.
So I went out and bought a third model of DIMMs that my buddy had used without trouble (Samsung Green DDR3L1600 Model MV-3V4G3D/US) today, and lo and behold I insert them and everything seems to work fine with the reverted 0070 BIOS.
So yeah, BEWARE. BIOS version 0083 demonstrably damaged my system memory to the point where the system would not boot. I would strongly suggest avoiding this version. I'm sick to death of dealing with Intel support, but this is so outrageous that I'm going to have to contact them and demand some sort of action. I have literally lost hundreds of dollars dealing with their piece of junk product and thousands of dollars worth of my time.
I've said it before in heated moments of frustration, but I really mean it: I will NOT be buying any more Intel Desktop boards, and I will NOT be recommending them. This product never should have been allowed to go to market with this pathetic level of DRAM validation and product testing, and support should have provided me with a replacement without requiring me to jump through hoops - hoops that they then yanked out of the way as I tried to jump through them! It's beyond ridiculous. I just want a refund for this motherboard so I can purchase from another manufacturer, but that's not going to happen. So angry with this. No excuse for it whatsoever.
Caveat Emptor!