Too bad! I found a workaround to the screaming noise - remove the fan, attach a bunch of video RAM heatsinks (I used the blue Zalman heatsinks with the thermal tape and stuck them to the black heatsink that holds the fan - I was too scared to remove the original heatsink entirely), and make a circuit from here:I have a pair of Dell XR997 (Intel EXPX9501AT) 10Gbase-t cards I'd be willing to part with. They work great - but I pulled them due to that screamy little fan. If your servers are put away somewhere that noise doesn't matter they'd do fine. PM me for price.
I currently have two Intel X520-DA2. One of them was the mis-ship that pushed me over the edge.Piglover: Which SFP+ card? I have two "screamy little fan" cards I'm not using and one SFP+ card.
I tried taking the HSF off the cards I got from PigLover and at least with the two I have the black sink is glued on from what I can tell. I didn't want to go to crazy on it and mess up the PHY, the chip under it. I was going to just put a larger fan in the slot next to it for desktop use, but putting some BGA sinks on wont hurt. Thanks for the idea. From what I have read it is not the intel chip, 82598, that makes the heat, but the PHY they used. Newer cards are using different PHY to lower power usage and heat.Too bad! I found a workaround to the screaming noise - remove the fan, attach a bunch of video RAM heatsinks (I used the blue Zalman heatsinks with the thermal tape and stuck them to the black heatsink that holds the fan - I was too scared to remove the original heatsink entirely), and make a circuit from here:
http://www.doctronics.co.uk/555.htm#astable
Choose resistors to generate 6000 RPM, then attach that to the pin where the yellow wire goes.
Then I placed this fan in close proximity to the heatsink:
http://www.amazon.com/Antec-Spot-Cool-SpotCool-System/dp/B000I5KSNQ
Done!
Thanks for the reply. It turns out the problem was a faulty patch cable. Bought some new shielded cat 7 cables and now it works. No errors. Seems the newer AT2 is better at handling noise, at least in my setup.I was able to get the PHY heatsink off my XR997. The ihs of the PHY is huge, so the stock heatsink with the pink putty Intel used stuck well.
PHY chip is a Teranetics TN1010-B2. I didn't find much on it. PLX Tech now owns Teranetics and didn't have anything for EOL stuff on the site. I did find it interesting their new silicone will run 10GBase-T over Cat5e for 45m.
I cut a new heatsink out of an old socket370 cooler I had. Not my best work but it will do. The holes of the board are too small to put a 6-32 screw through it so I got next smallest metric size, M3 I think. I have tried to run it without the fan connected, but no link is established. That makes sense. I routed the tach signal from a 80mm fan and it let me connect without trouble. I didn't think of checking the rpm of the fan before I cut the wire, I think it was in the 2k to 2.5k range. Either way, it seems the failed fan threshold is set low. I should be able to finish up my Cat6 wiring tomorrow to test 10GbE, currently only linked @1GbE to my switch. In the end I'll have point to point Windows to ESXi or Windows to ESXi passthrough to Ubuntu.
@malthe I found this discussion from a the Red Hat bugzilla. The fact that the AT2 is working for you, it uses the same Intel chip, 82598EB, would lead me to think it is bad hardware. Are you using the same driver for each? Also, try mcelog to see if you can get some more info on the error. Or put it into a different box with another OS.
Pictures of the chassis/card mirrored here: http://imgur.com/a/JnbuW.. has been customized with a special type of connector called an extended edge connector. The card itself is colored blue instead of green to indicate that it is nonstandard and cannot be installed in a standard x8 PCIe slot.
I know the post is almost ten months old, but I was hoping to pick your brain. These inexpensive MHEA28-XTC cards, have you ever gotten them to work with ESXi ? I can't find them anywhere on the vSphere HCL. The only alternative I've found so far is a pair of the newer ConnectX cards at about $250-300 a piece. I just want to play around with 10gbe between my VM and iSCSI filer, but it's really just a "fooling around" rig so cheaper is better Any thoughts ?I was playing around with dual port Infiniband (copper based) cards. Performance is pretty good, but the Mellanox cards I picked up were awesome under Windows, but not so much under ESXi and OpenSolaris. The dual port cards were $30-40 each making the internal hardware very inexpensive.