Yea, the avoton boards have an usually long post time. My new board, the ASRock E3C226D2I, posts nearly instantly in comparison.
Also, on a side note, I've been running this new board with a xeon 1230v3 for 48 hours now, no issues. The avoton board would lock up on me after 12 hours. This board has also been a 100x easier to work with, especially since the SATA ports are in a much easier spot to access. There's only 6 ports, but I used a cheap 2 port sata pcie card that seems to do the trick well.
At this point in time, until ASRock releases some firmware updates for their boards to address instability, I can't recommend them at all. It's a shame though, the avoton is pretty impressive in what it does. It puts out some good performance without barely even getting hot.
Ok - so I'll be home tomorrow and will try resetting the cmos - and though I highly doubt the issue is with the ram, I ordered another kit just to be 100% sure as I've heard all sorts of stories about how finicky this board is with ram. I will say that the Asrock tech support has also been really helpful (via email, they didn't respond to my phone call) and the rep has been emailing me back and fourth with suggestions. He said that sometimes (and that this had recently worked for another customer) flashing the BMC firmware can be a solution, even if it's the same version. I'll try that Friday and post results.
Thanks all - I hope to get this board running soon - I think once it's up and running it's going to be a great little rig... I'm just building a basic file server for plex... maybe do some torrenting on it - but in terms of servers it's going to be pretty basic so hopefully it'll work well as a 24/7 system.
Well stay tuned.