Okay. So I figured out the standalone mode situation, and you are going to really hate the answer, since it makes using it as a server much more…irksome.
a) The red/blue LED blinkies will persist for at least 3-5 minutes until it stabilizes and turn white, in which case the HDMI expansion port will activate. I am not sure what the board was doing at this time.
b) The USB-C power injection must, MUST be on the front 2 ports (the ones on the left/right closer to the bottom when held vertically), and you really should have a 100w USB-PD adapter to push power onto the board. The 65w will work…eventually, but not until a ridiculous amount of time elapsed, and you will be staring at the red/blue lights for quite a while until “something” happens.
c) I can’t seem to disable secureBoot or disable its enforcement (which is a feature on the 11th/12th Gen Intel boards), so any SSD that was not configured for Secureboot…simply won’t boot (so a drive I configured using the 12th gen Intel board for Proxmox 7.3 simply refuses to boot)
d) No options to control AMD-V or AMD-Vi, you can’t define the iGPU system RAM reservation size (its auto or game optimized, and I am not sure what that means)
Also, since standalone mode does not guarantee a display (it won’t be using the eDP port), it’s possible for the board to boot up to a state where you have no working display, and if you use a USB-C adapter with passthrough power, it does not seem to instantiate any connected HDMI port. This is much less refined than the behavior on both my 11th Gen and 12th Gen Intel boards.
Eh, so yeah, you almost certainly will need a Framework laptop chassis to configure it to work as a standalone mini-server on day 1, and to be honest, if you are going to have a Phoenix mini-server, you are probably better off with something like a Minisforum UM790 Pro. At least getting it to load the software that you need would likely be much less painful than it is at the current moment and you’ll likely pay less for the machine.