Super Micro X8DTH-iF WS build

Well things were going great. Hooked up my Intel Matrix RAID drive array and they were all recognized without any fiddling on my part. Even the RAID0 partition.

I then put in both my ATI HD 7870 cards and stuffed a rats nest of extra wires (non modular PS) and hooked it up. Tried to boot it up or even get into the BIOS. Nope! Nothing. So either the cards are stopping it or one off those wires has grounded out. Memory didn't even get warm, nor the CPU1. No beep codes. No magic smoke got let out either.

Audioaficionado said:

Well things were going great. Hooked up my Intel Matrix RAID drive array and they were all recognized without any fiddling on my part. Even the RAID0 partition.

I then put in both my ATI HD 7870 cards and stuffed a rats nest of extra wires (non modular PS) and hooked it up. Tried to boot it up or even get into the BIOS. Nope! Nothing. So either the cards are stopping it or one off those wires has grounded out. Memory didn't even get warm, nor the CPU1. No beep codes. No magic smoke got let out either.

Click to expand...

Try one card?

Also, remember to destroy the RAID array when you are finished with the disks. I used my HDD's from my Intel rig (with RAID 0) in my AMD raid and they worked.

Only when I put the once drive in my brother intel rig, the controller was seeing the RAID array even after a fresh format.


So that means my OS drive is still part of a RAID array then lol.

When I'm finished with this array, I'll make more wind chimes

It works with one card, but not both. There's gotta be a way or I'm getting a different board. My Commando handled it OK.

I installed an older version of FF 28.0 for a good reason so I could restore all my password, links, themes, etc. Then I immediately checked off 'never update' and clicked OK. First thing it did was to force updade me to 39.

Well there's some settings in the BIOS that are preventing me from running any off-board graphics cards. I can see the one in slot #3, but it stops it's signal after the post is done. The on-board graphics are barely tolerable. It's meant for remote control and not a working desktop. Did some online searches, but the only thing useful I found was that this serverboard will only work with a card in the #7 slot (next to and covered by the cpu cooler.

If I install both cards in slots #3 & #6 even the on-board graphics quit working.

Also Win7 starts out good, but slowly degrades and bogs down. this is on a powerful dual processor machine with an SSD. I have to hit the reset button to close windows as that 'logging off' screen will just stay there for hours and not progress. Task manager works at first but then slowly stops responding. This has got to be some kind of hardware/BIOS setting conflicts.

The documentation is written for pro IT guys who know what features are and what settings do. There's a lot under the hood in a top notch server board like SM builds. I hope I can get this thing working soon. Looks like a jumper shunt is missing in the middle of the PCIe slots. Don't know if that is causing my grief.

Here/s a picture of my rat's nest of a build. I'm never going to buy a non modular PS ever again. I'm also getting a better case that's built with wire management in mind.

Weird. Won't take a GPU in certain slots.......

At least it boots!
Wonder why windows bogs down though, that makes no sense...

I think because it's getting thrashed by the server hardware doing conflicting server stuff in the background. Task manager doesn't show any nefarious activity, but once everything slows way down, it's broken and can't help.

Small victory: I successfully hacked the lousy 1289x1024 max res Matrox driver installer. Now I'm at the full 1920x1080 res. 2D only and glacial, but at least I've got some room now.

I'm stumped why fresh install of win7x64 starts lagging in less than 30minutes and has to be hard reset to get it to shut off or turn off the computer. I have to reboot every 15 minutes to prevent this.

I uninstall the ATI drivers in case they were conflicting with the matrox driver. I've done several registry cleans with CClean. No parasitic processes in the background that eat up all the resources.

Maybe I can reinstall under AHCI instead of RAID. Don't know what the issue is software wise.

Is the CPU usage high after 30mins??

Longshot here but maybe run Prime blend to make sure it's stable. Maybe bad RAM?

I dunno as I haven't tried any stress tests yet. I'm leaving it running in safe mode overnight to see if it still exhibits the same freeze issues.

I let window stay in safe mode overnight and had task-manager running too. Everything was running ok in the morning. No freeze up like in normal mode. I applied all the updates including sp1. Still no joy. Next thing I'll try is Mint Linux to see if this happens there too. If so then it's the motherboard. If I end up getting another board, I'll get one without onboard graphics and IPMI.

Unless I can fix this, I might have to make this into a FreeNAS server. Maybe that remote control feature will come in handy.

Well the issue eventually starts to bog down even winows safe mode too. It just take hours instead of minutes.

Task manager eventually stops responding and I can't see what the cpu load or memory usage is.

That right there makes no sense.

Bad CPU? Try only one the switch then socket.
Maybe a bad socket??

Booted up in Knoppix, but that 3D Compiz was toooooooooo sssssslllllllllooooooowwwww. I need to figure out how to shut off the 3D WM and just get a simple 2D.

For some strange reason memtest86+ wouldn't boot up

really? That's really messed up.. memtest shouldn't have an issue...

FWIW I've unplugged the RAID array for now. Memtest still won't boot on this system, but will on another Intel system. I have windows up normal mode. Have taskmanager and Resource Monitor up. We'll see if they die a slow death like earlier times. Here's a screenshot of Superdoctor III showing nothing of concern.




Next I'll only have the DVD plugged in to see if I can get memtest to launch.
Things are starting to get laggy again. Won't be long.

Well I need a working system like yesterday

So I disconnected the Intel Matrix RAID array and now Windows stays up indefinitely. So it seems that the ICH10 on the SM board can't handle the Matrix RAID built on the ICH8R on my Asus Commando. I can try and delete the RAID0 segment to see if that's what's buggering things up. I duped it already so nothing will be lost. Memtest won't boot. I haven't unplugged the last HD and tried yet. I did switch them around from the SATA#1 & 2 slots with no difference.

Until I can get a different CPU cooler that allows me access to the top PCIe slot, I'm dead in the water. I suppose I could pull CPU #2 since it should run with only CPU #1 and that would clear the PCIe slot to try a graphics card.

After that, If I can't get it working properly, I'm going back to my Commando so I can access my RAID array effortlessly as before.

Huh. I thought Intel RAID would work on all Intel systems...
Guess there was something glitched out.

That really blows if you have to switch back to your commando man
What would you do with the server if you do?

Surely not dump it, you just built it!

Well I could throw it in my trunk and use it next winter as a traction device in the snow...

NOT!

I haven't given up yet, but my patience is starting to wear thin.

I finally got Memtest86+ to boot up. Had to unplug every hard drive and only leave the DVD drive plugged in It's running in SMP x64 mode. Sees all 24GB and both processor (all 16 logical cores). That should clear any issue4s with them. It's all about the motherboard's settings and design limitations built in by SM.

Next hurdle is to pull CPU 2 and see if it still boots. If so, then put in one of my HD 7870 cards in PCIe slot #7 and see if it works. This isn't a gaming board lol. Would have been nice if I could load it up with 4x cards in slots 1-3-5-7 and have a 1.4M PPD folding monster, but that's not what this board was meant to do. I would have gone with the X8DAH had I known it would be such a hassle. If I can get two cards running in slot 7 & 3, that would be great. When a card was in just slot #3, it showed up in device manager as functional and working, but it didn't put out any signal in the OS (only post). I'm sure it would have run GPU_FAH just fine and hope it will after I get a card working in #7.

Looks like the BIOS and IPMI firmware need to be updated today. I'll most likely have to unplug the HDs again to get the DOS boot to work.