Last weekend I went to install some extra RAM to hopefully carry me through until I’m able to upgrade it completely, only to find that one of the CPU sockets had stopped working.

Any time I attempted to boot with RAM installed in the banks belonging to Socket 2, it threw an error and wouldn’t POST. Ok, I thought. Not a show stopper, I can work around this temporarily. If I completely populate the banks for Socket 1 I’ll still have as much RAM as I had before I tried to upgrade it, even if I’m running on half the cores. Except my Jellyfin container failed to come back up, citing a missing PCIe device. And that’s when I realised that Supermicro in their infinite wisdom had decided to wire up both of this board’s PCIe x16 slots to Socket 2.

So now we’re limping along in a much reduced state. Half the cores, half the RAM and no GPU transcoding for Jellyfin. Hoping to sort that out today.

Edit: turns out I did not sort that out today, because the first thing I saw when I opened the big box from Bargain Hardware was this: