Oh my. One of the takeaways here, which I know all too well from experience, is that if you are building your own you never, ever, put yourself in a position where you have to depend on a successful conclusion by a set time, or limited by budget if something goes wrong (self inflicted or otherwise). You always have to assume that something will go wrong.
Now having said that, one of the first things is that you should never, ever have to flash the bios out of the box. Trust me, I have had cpus that a board didn’t support without a bios update first and you never want to put yourself in that position unless you are a diehard DIYer that has the time and money to burn tinkering with that including possibly bricking your MB. Been there done that.
Getting past that, you are not even getting through the POST. You should be able to put in a compatible cpu (hopefully no pins bent - been there done that too), minimal ram, whatever storage, since it has onboard graphics you don’t need a GPU card, so plug in a monitor and turn it on. Either port should work, but easy to plug it into the other if the first choice isnt displaying. You should at least see the bootstrap manufacturers display while the BIOS is loading, and if you ain’t seeing that its more fundamental. One of the biggest causes is the power to the MB is wrong (as in you haven’t set your PS to the correct mains voltage), or wrong or unseated connector, or RAM, something like that. It’s really fundamental if you can’t even see the MF bootstrap display.
I didn’t do much digging, but apparently there have been BIOS issues with that MB which Gigabyte has not been able to resolve, so they were offering replacements for ones that weren’t performing. Apparently, the replacement was the same MB but updated BIOS. A link to one of the articles I read is below. Further, this has been around for a while and the replacement program ended at the end of November this year but maybe you got some old stock. Who knows. If they are anything like some of the other Taiwanese mfgs, and Gigabyte is a huge mainstream player, they usually have decent customer support as I have had issues like this where the MFG replaced the MB, so let your fingers do some walking and maybe a call. One way or another though this will undoubtedly fall to the MB MFG because it is so new, but you can also talk to your parts seller. Some of them will also accept returns with almost no questions, so if you bought from a decent seller, you might get some love there too.
Don’t get too discouraged. You had a solid parts list with good vendors, stuff like this happens. Your tradeoff is that you are the one that has the pleasure of sorting out problems instead of paying someone else for a fully assembled rig, and even with fully assembled, some manufacturers go out of their way to ensure a great customer experience - like Apple. But you pay for it. On the other hand, you have choices, so enjoy the journey. Even the rough patches can be entertaining. And trust me - it is SO much better than the good (bad) old days when DIY meant soldering stuff onto MBs, and before that, where you had to wire up the backplanes.
Gigabyte decided to recall its Mini-ITX motherboard based on Z690 chipset.
