7A Bridge Instability
Motherboards that uses the 7A2000 bridge chip to provide PCIe interface are known to be unstable with certain peripherals (especially AMD graphics cards based on the GCN 1.0 - 4.0 architectures). Users of these graphics cards may see driver instabilities, graphical glitches, application crashes, or even lock ups. The cause behind this issue is yet to be confirmed.
At present, some Linux distros includes workarounds for this issue, which improves the situation significantly, but we still see occasional user complaints.
If you have ran into situations like this, improving cooling on the bridge chip is also known to lessen the symptom.
USB Devices Lost on Startup
Some users reported that their USB keyboards and mice may stop working after system startup, and repeated plugging in/out may be needed before they function again.
According to investigation by an engineer at Loongson Technology, this was caused by a hardware flaw in the Loongson 7A2000 bridge chip. A workaround for this issue has been included since Linux 6.15-rc1, commercial distros based on the Linux 6.6 (ABI20.) or 4.19 (ABI1.0) kernels also include this workaround.
Lack of Firmware Update
According to user feedback, this motherboard sees few firmware updates and there are multiple known firmware bugs:
- Early firmware lacked the option to turn off x86 UEFI GOP emulation for GPUs, causing newer AMD graphics cards (RX 5000 and above) and Intel discrete graphics cards to be unusable.
- Some firmware versions do not output a display signal from discrete graphics cards, while the onboard HDMI output (7A2000) only displays a cursor.
More seriously, firmware updates for this motherboard are not released in any public, fixed venue.
TIP
If you have purchased this motherboard and encountered firmware-related issues, please contact your distributor. Should you be able to obtain related firmware updates, we encourage that you contact us to upload firmware for others to use.
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