Adding a GPU to a Supermicro K1SPE.

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EvilMagpie

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Feb 18, 2019
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I picked up this Xeon Phi-based machine for a song. The problem is, as soon as I add a GPU to it, the board gets stuck on 90 - BIOS PCIe Enumeration when POSTing. It boots fine otherwise with no PCIe cards installed.

Per this review:
https://www.servethehome.com/superm...l-xeon-phi-x200-developer-workstation-review/

"Be forewarned if you are thinking about adding a GPU to the system, you will need to adjust the factory default BIOS settings. Options such as Above 4G encoding need to be changed to support modern GPUs. If you try this, and get a hang at DXE PCIe enumeration you know what went wrong."

I already have 4G encoding enabled, but what other settings need to be changed to get it to boot properly? And I've tried three different cards so far, each of them with 2GB of memory or less.
 
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EvilMagpie

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Feb 18, 2019
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After messing with this machine for a while:
1. The VGA output will hang on 90 - BIOS PCIe Enumeration when booting, however at this point the DVI (or other) output on whatever GPU has been added is now enabled. Switch to that video output if you happen to have the onboard VGA and the GPU's video output connected to the same monitor.
2. Some hang ups or problems booting (including the red light of doom illuminating on the motherboard, or DPC watchdog violation) are caused by the SATA driver. Take your OS drive (in this case, Server 2012 R2), plug it into another machine, go into Device Manager, uninstall the Standard SATA AHCI Controller, power off the machine and put the OS drive back into the Xeon Phi machine.
3. Windows sees this CPU as having 5 sockets. Which explains why Windows 7 Pro only saw 24C/96T, as it's limited to 2 sockets.
4. Fedora 26 doesn't have any of these sorts of problems. :p
 

Vycid

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Apr 26, 2018
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3. Windows sees this CPU as having 5 sockets. Which explains why Windows 7 Pro only saw 24C/96T, as it's limited to 2 sockets.
4. Fedora 26 doesn't have any of these sorts of problems. :p
Very interesting. Are you running the memory in All2All or Quadrant mode? 5 is a surprising number.

What happens if you run Windows 10 Pro for Workstations I wonder? Does it see 80% of the physical cores?
 

EvilMagpie

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Feb 18, 2019
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It shows up as 5 regardless of which mode I choose. However, Windows 10 Pro correctly sees the system as having 1 socket.
You can get Win10 to start in SNC-2 mode, even though it says in the BIOS it isn't supported in Windows: Here, Cinebench sees 128C/256T, CoreTemp sees 64C/256T, and Task Manager sees 118C/256T. Yes, 118.
 

EvilMagpie

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Feb 18, 2019
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Something as simple as adding a sound card generates enough system interrupts (which don't appear to be handled well at all) takes the Cinebench score from 1660 to around 1080. Disabling it in Device Manager takes it back to 1660.