[geeks] Dual Xeons - the Saga continues

[Lionel Peterson]

I have a similar era Sun dual-Xeon server, new in box w/ memory and drives I'd
happily send you for the cost of shipping.

I fully understand it's not worth what it would cost to ship.

Lionel

> On Feb 3, 2018, at 10:42 AM, Mark Benson <md.benson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
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