I acquired myself 2 of these boards, so here like you, my experiences with it.
After weeks of waiting finally arrived a big box with hardware, It contained 2x boards with 4x CPU's and 8x Memory modules each, 2x 1100 watt PSU's and 10 500 GB SATA drives.
The only thing I wanted to do was turn them on, install them, play with them, however that bubble quickly burst, no cooling :(.
I decided to put on some evil shoes and turn one on anyways knowing the overheat protection would prevent damage (in theory).
Hooked one up found some old random heat sinks, glued them on with thermal paste lol and turned it on.
Both my boards had a case of a bad battery as well, luckily I also had a bunch on hand so that was an easy fix.
So after everything it was time to hit the switch, the fans started spinning, and with full anticipation I looked at the screen and gently touching the frame of a CPU lol heating up...no response, then finally the screen came up, getting really hot now, and boom off. Assume the thermal heat protection kicked in, but it worked!
The 8x coolers from china ordered on ebay did not arrive and have still not arrived to this day, another batch of 8 was ordered from the UK this time and arrived within a week.
I was very excited and ready to go until i realized the coolers did not fit! It turned out these SuperMicro boards use some proprietary mounting and a regular, the coolers came with a nice ring for Intel CPU's but that obviously did not fit. So the manual (should have RTFM lol) stated the required mounting bracket was a BKT-0012L, so ordered 8 pairs and now finally it seems I was ready to go.
After installing all the coolers and hooking up all peripherals I was ready to install... so I thought...
I had some issues getting them to work, they simply would not boot up / do anything, seems taking out the memory modules and given those and the banks a clean made them come on, apparently these supermicro boards are a bit picky with placement and these boards have obviously seem some use.
Finally after taking out all memory modules and CPU's giving everything a clean and placing it back allowed me to POST and access the BIOS.
Success! I was excited and ready to install my OS, so I grabbed my Debian CD put it in the drive and boot, so far so good, the installer process went without any problems, DHCP succeeded, all disks detected and the installation finished without a hitch.
It was time to boot into the new system, but that is where the troubles started after grub I would be left with only a blinking cursor a unresponsive system and nothing more. The strange thing was both systems did the exact same thing. I re-installed the OS several times, tried different distro's and eventually in desperation tried Windows (blegh lol). They all had the same result with the exception of Windows which would halt at the message "Setup is starting windows".
At this time it was deep into the night and some sleep was needed, the next day I would continue.
I had no idea what the issue was, a Google query on the issue showed I was not the only one but none of the provided solutions would help.
I decided to make some changes to the BIOS and see if that would make any difference, after several configuration attempts I disabled the quick boot and after this the system would halt during the full memory test, after taking out all modules from both systems and testing them it finally passed the memory test and voila after grub it now continued and booted the OS, it seems faulty memory sticks prevented the kernel from loading.
After replacing only 1 module each time into the working system it turned out that 2 of the 16 modules were faulty, hence why both systems portrayed the same symptoms.
More Success! Finally, both systems are working booting the OS and appear to be fully functional!
Enjoyed your little endeavor story to get these working, hope you'll enjoy mine and hopefully it can help someone having issues with these guys.
Here some pictures:
The coolers and my little workplace:
The boards:
I only have one question for anyone out there regarding the cooling:
Right now I am using scenario A, I figured A would be better since it can suck cold air in from the center and blow it away to the sides of the board and that scenario B would blow hot air from one CPU to the other, but I am wondering if Scenario B might be better because I would also like to add some fans to each side of the board to blow air over the chipset and board.
I am also wondering if A is the best approach since CPU 1 and 2 are quite close together and I am worried they will be fighting for air?
Unlike your EVO coolers I am unable to rotate mine the mount is fixed on to the cooler so I cannot the coolers and fans 45 degrees.
Maybe anyone has any suggestions (I don't have a case, do intend to get or make one eventually).
Temps on the first run:
Temps in gnome desktop:
When using the "stress" command to put a 100% load on all cores the temperature did not exceed 50 degrees.
Have you had any success in reading more sensor information besides CPU temperature?
The boards seem to have a expansion slot for a IPMI device but there must be a way to retrieve things like fan RPM, voltages, etc (shown in BIOS not in OS).
Happy holidays from The Netherlands.
post edited by CybieC - 2015/01/01 06:26:26