Fun and Games with the SuperMicro X9SRI

Scored a Supermicro X9SRI off eBay as a useful way of using up my DDR3 memory once I start decomissioning some of the older machines in the house. It has 8 slots so I can get a tidy 64GB into it when fully loaded. It turns out that this board - or maybe Intel's server chipsets - are a little temperamental.

I paired it with a Xeon 1650 v2 which is slightly faster than an i7-4930K and is still quite respectable CPU. That's round about a Ryzen 2600 level in modern terms and a lot cheaper, especially when you factor in the price difference between DDR3 and DDR4 RAM. And there my problems started...

I reset the BIOS, loaded up defaults and proceeded to install Linux. Everything went fine, for a while, and then I started getting random hard freezes - but not associated with any particular activity. After swapping out RAM, video cards and everything else I was till no nearer a solution. In desperation, I acquired another Xeon (E5-2609 this time - cheap enough for a quick test) and sure enough, I dropped it in and everything worked fine. So, it's the CPU, I thought, but I was puzzled by the behaviour - working fine under heavy load (Phoronix CPU Benchmark Suite) and the freezing at idle didn't seem like any other failure I'd come across. So I worked my way through the BIOS Options and discovered that the culprit was in the CPU Power Management Settings. If I set it to Power Saving (the default) then I get freezes, but if I set it to Performance then all is well. Interestingly, Linux still seems to do power saving, dropping the clockspeed and voltage of the CPU so it runs quite cool at idle. So I have no idea what the setting does other than break v2 Xeons!

I dropped an old GT 710 card in so I didn't have to live with the 1280x1024 that the on board video can do. I hesitate to call it a GPU but it's only really meant for IPMI redirection so I'm being a little unfair. That works fine with nouveau but I install the proprietary nVidia drivers which have better power management.

Finally, I drop in an Intel Quad Port PRO/1000PT to give me a few more ethernet ports to play with and the board refuses to boot - giving me beep sequences instead. A few more card swaps and it transpires that the Intel card really hates being in PCI-E 3.0 slots and will only start up in the middle, PCI-E 2.0, slot. I was hoping to put it on the slot further away from the video card since the PT gets quite warm but there you are. Reminds me of the old DOS days fiddling around with interrupt combinations to get all your peripherals to work.