SuperMicro H11SSL-i Motherboard Weirdness

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gregoinc

New Member
Apr 27, 2023
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I have a bit of a story to tell, so hope you will stick with me. I also hope to provide as much data as possible to explain the situation.

I have a SuperMicro H11SSL-i motherboard installed in my homelab server that is running Proxmox. The server has been running fine for some time, with a workload of virtual machines and containers. Recently I was considering adding a GPU to pass through to my Plex container as I had read that passing through a GPU to Plex could significantly assist with transcoding.

I had a spare Quadro P600 GPU lying about so I added it to the CPU SLOT6 PCI-E 3.0 X16 of the SuperMicro Motherboard. I should also explain what other cards are in the server and in which slots.

In CPU SLOT1 PCI-E 3.0 X8 I have an Intel dual port 10 gigabit network card, with a 10gb GBIC in one SFP+ port.
In CPU SLOT4 PCI-E 3.0 X16 I have an ASUS Hyper M.2 X16 PCIe 3.0 X4 Expansion Card

All of the current cards work fine, and the server operates really well. However... when I added the Quadro P600 GPU to the CPU SLOT6 PCI-E 3.0 X16 the network card stopped working? Despite trying a number of things the network card in CPU SLOT1 PCI-E 3.0 X8 wouldn't work. I purchase a Tesla P4 headless GPU to see if that would make a difference, however the issue remains the same no matter which GPU is used.

Another odd thing I have noticed. I am unable to gain access to the BIOS settings of the server. I try and press DEL when the SuperMicro screen comes up, but no matter how many times I press DEL the BIOS screen does not activate. And it seems if I press DEL too many times the BIOS stalls/freezes at step 95... see screen capture here:
If I dont press DEL the server goes through it's pre-boot steps and then launches Proxmox. I am thinking of removing the ASUS Hyper M.2 X16 PCIe 3.0 X4 Expansion Card in CPU SLOT4 PCI-E 3.0 X16 which contains the Proxmox boot disk and see what happens with the BIOS settings access.

So, right now, the server will boot and operate when a GPU is not installed, but I cannot get into the BIOS. See the specs on the server as obtained from the BMI screen:
You may note I am running BIOS version 2.1 and SuperMicro has BIOS version 2.8 available. So I am also curious to gain feedback on whether or not I should upgrade the BIOS via the BMI console to version 2.8?

Appreciate any feedback from the SuperMicro gurus here. My priority at present is to add a GPU and pass it through in Proxmox.
 
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