Managed to snag a used R7910 barebones for a decent price; have a few questions:
- What are the differences between R7910 and R730? As far as I can tell, chassis, motherboard etc. are identical -- just BIOS? Quieter fans?
- Does the R7910 support PCIe slot bifurcation? It's mentioned in the manual for R730 (Dell PowerEdge R730 Owner's Manual) but not R7910 (Dell Precision Rack 7910 Owner's Manual)
- Are BIOSs cross-compatible between R7910 and R730?
- Has anyone successfully removed microcode from an R7910/R730 BIOS to enable higher all-core turbo on Haswell?
- I'm aware the R730 doesn't have hot-swap nVME support; are NMVe devices still bootable?
- Is the R720 NVMe enablement kit compatible (backplane + riser card) with R730/R7910? Backplane seems to be dimensionally similar to my 8-bay backplane and have holes in the right places. Only PCIe 2.0, though
- Finally, when I enter my service tag into the Dell website, the machine shows up as a T7910 tower; which seems to be a *very* different machine from the R7910. Despite this, the component list shows the correct rackmount chassis, PSU, risers etc. I assume I should ignore the T7910 downloads and use BIOS for R7910, or are they compatible?
- What are the differences between R7910 and R730? As far as I can tell, chassis, motherboard etc. are identical -- just BIOS? Quieter fans?
- Does the R7910 support PCIe slot bifurcation? It's mentioned in the manual for R730 (Dell PowerEdge R730 Owner's Manual) but not R7910 (Dell Precision Rack 7910 Owner's Manual)
- Are BIOSs cross-compatible between R7910 and R730?
- Has anyone successfully removed microcode from an R7910/R730 BIOS to enable higher all-core turbo on Haswell?
- I'm aware the R730 doesn't have hot-swap nVME support; are NMVe devices still bootable?
- Is the R720 NVMe enablement kit compatible (backplane + riser card) with R730/R7910? Backplane seems to be dimensionally similar to my 8-bay backplane and have holes in the right places. Only PCIe 2.0, though
- Finally, when I enter my service tag into the Dell website, the machine shows up as a T7910 tower; which seems to be a *very* different machine from the R7910. Despite this, the component list shows the correct rackmount chassis, PSU, risers etc. I assume I should ignore the T7910 downloads and use BIOS for R7910, or are they compatible?