Hi and well, I'm back.
I put in 384GB of RAM in the thing (all read first time - Dell would sit on that for multiple boots and maybe 10 mins!), set the bios to Watercooled mode. And got some good numbers on CPU-Z, like 751 ST and 44,000+ on MT with all 8 channels populated (it was around 41,000 / 42,000 with four dimms).
But what I never saw right, was the storage performance. It seems as though there must have been some high latency affecting it. Each of my 905p's would have like 9MB/s in ATTO / 4kB, and then sometimes 180MB/s.
I pulled the 2TB SN8100 from the Dell (again that booted right away), but was also horrible. It could peak sometimes near 11GB/s or even 14GB/s but performance was all over the place. And also roughly the same in the 4kB numbers, maybe a bit better... PCIe issues on this board I was suspecting.
Bored of chasing that, I played with the Intel's ITU, and made just a +200MHz change to each bin, applied it, and locked up. Rebooted it and it never came back.
I had some Qcode message about PCH before microcode [or something similar], then PCIE initialization. Now I get stuck at Qcode 92 [PCI Bus Initialization is started].
With manual in hand, I locate what looks like a bios battery underneath the rear IO board, but there's no way my fingers can reach that. Not sure i see a bios rest button either, just a RETRY, and a SAFE BOOT. But neither has saved the day. So how does one get to the CMOS battery?
BMC reveals a CATPROCERR asserted at my tinkering-time, but also it was de-asserted later. Did I really fry such an expensive CPU?
My last resort is either a bios reset, or restore. Then I'm going to have to try the 3495X back in the Dell.
As an aside, the seller of the failed ES CPU I had, refunded without a single word of communication, nor asked for his bad chip back. I guess at this point it would have been nice of him to send another as asked, but c'est la vie.
Appreciate any / all ideas on how to move forward.
Regards.
