• Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!

Sulltrail D5400XS Nightmare!

Overclockers is supported by our readers. When you click a link to make a purchase, we may earn a commission. Learn More.

MichaelFreedman

New Member
Joined
Jul 10, 2008
Howdy,

I have been trying in vain to get a system up and running with the "top of the line" Intel motherboard and have been having nothing but troubles. I'm hoping someone here may have some insight.

The system is in a Supermicro rack mount chassis with a 900W power supply.
Dual 3.2GHZ Quad core processors
16GB FB-Dimm 800MHz memory
Areca 1680ix Disk Controller PCI-E x8
NVidia Quadro FX 3700 video
Various other PCI/PCI-E cards.
OpenSUSE 10.3 32 and 64bit - OpenSUSE 11.0 64bit
Bios revision 1140 (the latest)

I am building this system to control a radar system and what I am finding is that with one exception, I am having problems with every board I put in the system.

The only PCI card that I see no problems with is an Intel based Gigabit Ethernet card. The Nvidia card I have in there now seems to be pretty stable, but the Quadro FX 3450 that I had in there was a little flaky on shutdown.

My Areca card causes system hangs, and when any other PCI card is plugged in, hangs with an error described by Areca as an unrouted interrupt on bootup.

The other card I have been desperatly tying to get working is a Pentek Digital Reciever card. This card works in both my Dell 490 and Dell 690 with no problems. In the Intel system, the IRQ never gets routed. If I look in the PCI configuration space, the interrupt line is 0xFF. As is usual, Intel tech support doesn't have a clue.

I have also tried a Symmetricom True Time GPS card, and an IOTech analog I/O card as well. They both come up again without the interrupt routed.

I have tried every combination of kernel boot option including disabling ACPI and APIC. My problem is that this is the only board with the slot configuration that I need. Is this par for the course for an Intel board?

Thanks in advance for any input.

Michael Freedman
 
:welcome: to OCF

First let me say you got one kick arse system there.

I would like to know.... Are these errors coming up when the machine is posting, or is it just when the o/s loads up?

If it is when the motherboard is posting this may be a cause for an RMA (Return to Manufacturer) on the motherboard.

If it is after the board completely passes the POST routine and it happens when the O/S is loading... This would be a question for the Alternative Operating Systems sub-forum.
 
Thanks for the props. Gonna build 10 more if I can get this one to work. :-D

Needless to say, it hangs sometimes during post with a 94 on the screen. (I think it means clearing keyboard buffer). However I've tried changing out keyboards. It also, when running shows a code on the LED on the board of 02. No documentation on that one. The other problems are when the OS comes up. However I can put the same cards/OS on my other two Dell machines with no issues at all. If only I didnt need a rack mount, four PCI-Express x16 slots, etc....

Thanks for the quick response.

Mike
 
Whew that's a defiant setup there. You said radar for these systems and they are rack mount, why the high end GPU? Just curious is all seems odd that it would use a 3D card but im not in that business.

And welcome to the forums.

Well guess things to try just to eliminate other issues...

Make sure you have the latest bios, try using less ram and maybe 1 CPU. Then try using the cards, 1 by one add them then add the ram eventually and CPU if it gets that far. Trying to eliminate possible conflict in hardware, its a shot in the dark but worth it.
 
I personally would say that something in your motherboard is not stable and I would put it up for RMA. I wish I knew what some of those errors were though, but maybe someone else knows more about your codes as they may be able to say on how to fix it or just give you more reason to RMA it.
 
:) It is a killer system. Can't send pics though, no cameras allowed in here. As for the GPU, I am actually doing signal processing in the GPU core. Going to be going with one of the new NVIDIA compute cards soon. Im ordering an ASUS Z7 WS board today. Problem is that I lose to x16 slots that I was hoping to take advantage of. Just to make you drool a little more, I just ordered 5 WD Caviar Black 1TB Stata disks and 18 400GB 15K SAS disks for this system. The rack mount chassis has 24 disk slots. Also two 30" Dell 3008 monitors. Too bad I need a twin system on my desk for developement.
 
Back