DC53427HYE Stuck at blinking light once every 5 seconds.

[KHoft]

Have tried moving BIOS jumper from pins 1-2 to pins 2-3 with CMOS battery disconnected. I get NO FAN and NO OUTPUT. The green power LED on the motherboard is illuminated when attached to power supply. Unit seems bricked in hibernate mode with no means to resume normal operation. Long press on power button will stop the blue LED 5 second blink, green power LED on motherboard remains illuminated. Short press on power button resumes blue LED 5 second blink. At this point nothing is attached to the motherboard, no memory, no M.2, no WiFi. I expect to see fan start when power button is depressed, then expect blue LED to indicate an error blink., What I do see green motherboard LED always illuminated when power is attached, and either a solid blue LED when powered up or a 5 second blink when short press on power button. Short press on power button when blinking does not resume from hibernation.

[Amy_C_Intel]

Hello, TexasTea:

• The NUC was in hibernation mode and now is not going back to normal, is this correct?
• Could you please let us know the BIOS version and the operating system installed?

Regards,

[KHoft]

Amy,

I received the unit inoperative. At the time of my original post, I had tried all the known remedy to bring the DC53427HYE out of what I thought was hibernation mode. Since there was no POST (unable to wake from hibernation) I had no clue what BIOS version was installed. There was no drive, no memory, and no wireless connected. I had installed a blank Micron 256GB mSata drive, 16Gb Hynix 1.35v 204 pin SODIMM ram to test. When powered up with correct power supply there was nothing to indicate it had power until I gave the power button one short press. The blue light came on then when off for about 5 second, then illuminated again, then repeat the same cycle. I was able to long depress the power button to return the unit to no blue light. Once the unit was disassembled, and powered on by the correct power supply I noted that there was a green light illumination on the back side of the motherboard. There was no cooling fan operation at this point. Subtracting memory, swapping memory, Shorting CMOS jumper, removing the clean mSata drive, removing the CMOS battery all had no effect. Not as a single operation or combined operation of removing or swapping hardware.

The actual fix was to re-flow the CPU and chip set on the motherboard. There was no visible damage to the motherboard under a microscope. The only conclusion I could make was an apparent broken or cold solder contact. Heating the back side, opposite side of motherboard from the physical chips did the trick. Unconventionally this was done with the heat sink still attached binding the cpu to the opposite side of the motherboard. A solder reflow heat gun was used along with three thermal probes to establish uniform heating.

Once the board was allowed to naturally cool to ambient temperature, it was repopulated with drive, memory, and wireless. Power was applied and the unit started normally to visual BIOS. The unit was next fully assembled and tested again by loading Microsoft Windows 8.1 Professional. Everything loaded, works normally and allows me to write this reply from the very same unit.

I knew this problem was rather unique as I have not seen one other occurrence as I have described. The repair was beyond orthodox, and very likely one that would render the unit beyond repairable, but I was at the point where a failed attempt would be better than no attempt to repair.I am quite happy with the end result.

[Amy_C_Intel]

TexasTea, I'm glad that you were able to resolve it, thank you for taking the time to communicate your experience.

Enjoy your Intel® NUC.

If you need further assistance let us know.

Regards,

[n_scott_pearson]

Kids, don't try this at home...

[KHoft]

N. Scott Pearson

Read the post carefully son, the method used to repair the non-functioning board is NOT only unorthodox, it very well can destroy an otherwise good board. I was not working with a good board.

Not many DIY repair folk have access to a digital microscope or a test bench equipped to handle circuit analysis. The solution I chose was not random. The solution was carefully controlled.

Again, this was a unique solution to a rare yet specific fault.

FYI... This single DC53427HYE works flawlessly to this day and does pass very stringent testing.

[n_scott_pearson]

Oh, I understood the description just fine; I was making a joke.

I actually don't consider it unorthodox either. Working at Intel for many years (though as a S/W engineer - and now retired), I had plenty of opportunities to watch this being done. Every time FAB A samples of a new product came in from the factory, some level of repair or rework usually proved necessary...

...S

[TimelessNL]

Hi,

I know it has been a long time. But I'm curious if the NUC (if it is not decommissioned already) is still working.

Recently I acquired the same device with the exact same fault condition. I do have a hot air station but to my experience a re-flow on a misbehaving processor does not last very long (example). So what I mostly do is pre-heat the board/processor very short and with the board still warm (not hot) I turn it on to see if that makes it 'work'. If that's the case then the processor is most likely on it's way out and not worth repairing since it then involves replacing the entire chip (in this case the CPU).

However... I did just that. Pre-heating the CPU/Chipset directly on the die, and that did absolutely nothing. symptoms where still the same. So I continued and pre-heated the opposite site (with RAM slots) around the CPU/Chipset area with heatsinks attached as you did. And with the board still warm I turned it on and what do you know... the fan kicked in, but since I did not have any RAM plugged in the board did its RAM missing flash routine and turned off. So I went ahead and populated the RAM slots and turned it on... and back to the 5sec LED flash it was. So for the 3th time I got some RAM plugged in (which I was risking to loose) and heated the board and when still warm turned it on and it booted just fine.

So then I thought lets update the BIOS, see if that automatically solves something. I did all the possible steps and neither of them worked, they all rebooted the device (as they should) but didn't actually start the flashing procedure (neither F7 or DOS iFLASH utility). Only by removing the yellow jumper and preparing a FAT32 USB stick with .BIO file the procedure actually started and succeeded.

So I was curious and installed Proxmox gave it some VM's with random workload and let it sit for a couple of days. And to my surprise it was still going strong after 2 days. I even (soft)rebooted it a couple of times to make sure it wasn't just luck. Only after I turned it off completely (with power still attached) the 5sec problem returned, so I heated the board again for a couple of seconds which worked again... I did however notice that the device never actually stays off, when the device is shutdown it automatically turns itself back on resulting in the 5sec flashing pattern. So I guess even if it worked fine it was still unable to shutdown properly but instead triggered a restart. I made sure that all BIOS settings after power-up/wake-on-lan are set to disable/poweroff so that couldn't be it.

So long story short, it seems that something is prohibiting the device to cold-start but once it starts it remains working. This reminds me of the bug in the Intel Atom C2000 chips here. But for now I'm not able to pinpoint it any further.

This is why I'm curious if your device is still working or working when you decommissioned it.

Kind regards,

TimelessNL