[geeks] Dual Xeons - the Saga continues

[Mark Benson]

Hi,

You guys will recall I've been having 'Fun' (for a given quantity of 
'fun') trying to get a Dual Socket 771 Xeon Motherboard up and running 
to wedge into my old Dell server case.

Last I left it I'd discovered the Tyan motherboard I had had a blown 
memory socket that had toasted the board and killed the second CPU 
socket. That board's not languishing in a box somewhere. I got my money 
back so I care not.

So I bounced a decent wedge of cash on a new-old-stock Intel S5000XVNSAS 
motherboard that had been stripped unused from an Intel chassis. This is 
good because it's an excellent enterprise grade board. This is also bad 
because it's very complicated and a little hair-brained to work with.

It's an EFI 1.1 board and has a BIOS frontend for basic configuration 
but I have a problem with it. At boot time it spins all the fans up to 
high speed, then slows them down, then has a massive panic attack and 
throttles them all up to 100%. Annoying and very difficult to sit next to.

I can't find any way of diagnosing or configuring this setup. There's no 
fan settings in the BIOS at all. Intel have something called the Intel 
Deployment Assistant CD, which is the driver CD for the board but it 
also has a bootable Linux utility that is *supposed* to let you setup 
the board in some way using a GUI that OS independent. Except that 
doesn't wrk, any option I choose it just locks up. I have tried:

- Yanking a CPU to see if one was faulty
- Changing the coolers for the mahoosive ones from my 2006 Mac Pro
- Changing the one CPU for a E5130 out of the Mac Pro which is known good

I installed XP Pro SP2 on it and it seems stable, SpeedFan tells me the 
CPU temps are good (I ended up stealing my Mac Pro's heatsinks, which 
are awesome if you strap a fan to them!) and even a burn-in test using 
Prime95 got them to a perfectly usable 60 Celcius. It's stable, stuff 
runs, it's not crashing... but I'll go deaf sat next to it in the server 
chassis.

The CD has some Windows Utilities and config tools but they don't work 
in XP, only Server 2003 or 2007 and WinPE.

I'm stuck. Again. Anyone got any ideas?

-- 

Mark Benson