• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Supermicro & ES chips

redmasc

Gawd
Joined
Apr 28, 2005
Messages
798
I got a Supermicro board and I'm having some issues booting it with some ES chips that are socket 2011. Anyone know how Supermicro handles ES chips? Someone suggested that I flash the board with the latest BIOS and see if that will work, but I need a retail CPU to do it. Before I plop down money for a chip, does anyone have any thoughts?
 
There are some compatibility issues between early (Bx) chips and 2011 motherboards.

Wyluliraven and Patriot have probably most experience with those around here.
 
It does need ECC memory but REG / ECC is not needed or necessassary unless you have a boat load of $$$ to spend on memory.
 
I picked up some ECC memory to give it a test run. But the board doesn't beep when there is no memory installed. So I'm narrowing down the possibility to the CPU's being ES as the culprit.
 
What stepping? My Asus board would not even begin to initialize components - so no BIOS beeps (stayed at code 00) - with B0 chips. C0 it fired right up. And what makes it a little harder (in the case of my Asus) was that it was not the BIOS itself causing the issue - it was some other code not updated during a normal BIOS update (may still reside on the BIOS chip though) or perhaps even a hardware change (unlikely). Does your board have a replaceable BIOS chip? You can buy new chips for $20 or so off ebay (if replaceable) and some sellers say they will reprogram with whatever BIOS you want.
 
My Asus is very picky when it gets rebooted, my B0 2665's are not great on the restart, also I think non QVL ram does not help with the early chips. It can take several reboots to get it to boot up and I still cannot get turbo to work on them.
 
All my chip says is QA8X ES 2.30 GHZ A4 C1138786. What Asus board are you running? People mentioned that the Asus Z9PE-D8 WS has a chance of booting up my chip.
 
All my chip says is QA8X ES 2.30 GHZ A4 C1138786. What Asus board are you running? People mentioned that the Asus Z9PE-D8 WS has a chance of booting up my chip.

That's the asus board I use. It has a good chance but nothing is guaranteed, especially if the board has a new bios version.

just an FYI on those CPU's, they should be hex cores - if you get them to boot please let me know so I can update my list
 
Yep - QA8X, Y, and Z are all the same. 8 cores with 2.3 base, 2.4 all core, and 2.5 max turbo. And stepping B0.
 
Thanks for the heads up. I'll be getting my Supermicro board back from RMA so I'll give it go once I get it back sometime this week. If that still doesn't work, I'll pick up the Asus board. The only problem with the Asus board is that it tops out at 64 Gb of non ECC ram. With ECC memory it can go up to 256 Gb. I need 96-128 Gb, and after looking up prices, mother of God...
 
My Z9PE-D16/2L would not boot at all with QA8Z. Though the guy who sold me them was running them in the exact board with the newest BIOS. Apparently if you have an old board and update the BIOS you are fine, but new board no good. Perhaps if you replace the entire BIOS chip with an old one it might work. No idea if this problem also exists in the D8. D16 also used to be good with the B0s.
 
Perhaps if you replace the entire BIOS chip with an old one it might work.

On the supermicro board, the bios chip is soldered directly onto the board. Yeah, I'm not messing with that.


As to why I need all that ram, it's for rendering scenes in after effects. That program pretty much uses all the available ram your system has, but allocates a few for system services. I'm just looking to cut down my rendering time.
 
Thanks for the heads up. I'll be getting my Supermicro board back from RMA so I'll give it go once I get it back sometime this week. If that still doesn't work, I'll pick up the Asus board. The only problem with the Asus board is that it tops out at 64 Gb of non ECC ram. With ECC memory it can go up to 256 Gb. I need 96-128 Gb, and after looking up prices, mother of God...

I know the 16 dimm slot SM 2P boards say they will run with 128gb worth of UDIMMS (16x8Gb), but I wouldn't count on it. That's asking a lot of the memory controllers (and note speed is limited to 1333 in that arrangement).
 
That (remove BIOS chip) was in regard to the Asus boards which do have socketed BIOS chips (if you eventually went that route).
 
Ok I got the board back from RMA and I popped in the retail CPU and it booted up. I'm able to install windows. In order to update the BIOS, it states in the readme file that, I need to update the IPMI firmware also. And that I can do it using the webgui. But I'm not sure how I find out the address in order to do so. I figured that I would type in the IP of my computer into the web browser and that should do the trick, but that didn't work. Anyone with any ideas?
 
I don't believe you absolutely _must_ update IPMI firmware.

Still, if you wish to do so, make sure to connect IPMI LAN port (usually dedicated) and look IPMI IP
address up in the BIOS (there should be a status screen with that).
If it's not there, you can check DHCP client list in your router or install dedicated IPMI client which has
IP address scan feature.
 
In order to update my BIOS, I have to update the IPMI firmware. Bios won't let me proceed until I do so. Thanks for the info, the status screen info helped. I connected the IPMI lan port into my router, and from my router back to the lan port. Used an IPMI management client found on supermicro's FTP server and flashed it from there. Thanks again!
 
Finished updating my BIOS, and the 2 ES chips that I have are a no go. Board will not post with them :(
 
I guess I'm reviving an old thread, but I had to downgrade my bios on my P9X79-WS to get it to boot a QA8Z. I ordered 2 chips with the oldest bios on them since they are cheap, and I ran through each upgrade until I found one that it booted. Didn't need the second chip and It runs great now.
 
So, they didn't boot with the oldest BIOS? Which version ended up working for you?
 
Back
Top