Hi We have recently bought a supermicro(www.supermicro.com) server with a 2U chassis and a P3TDDE dual cpu motherboard with no onboard video. The problem is that we also bought a 5 disk raid array that required a raid controller card. Since the raid controller card is too big to fit in a 2U chassis, we had to use a PCI riser card. Now, the pci riser plugs into the first(highest) PCI slot and when we plug the raid controller in, it blocks all the other PCI slots. The riser has two(2) PCI slots, so, since we needed a video card, we plugged it with the raid controller on the PCI riser. But, it doesn't work. When the raid and video cards are plugged on the same PCI riser, therefore the same PCI slot, they don't work. We've tested them in the normal PCI slots with the case cover off and everything works perfectly, we were able to install windows and all that. But we need to close this cover and can't. Is there any way we can plug the two in the same PCI riser? Is this some sort of IRQ setting problem? Is there any way we can workaround this problem? Thanks a lot Marc Tomkinson
I can't say I've worked with PCI riser cards, so this is just a guess. Have you considered it might be a bad riser? 2nd, for the video card, you might want to see if someone makes a card with a low riser plate for something like a 2U chassis. I know Asus has a GeForce 2 MX, but I cannot remember if it's AGP or PCI. The AGP card would solve some of the problem. The other suggestion, and I don't know if this is an option, is to buy a 5U or so case. Another place I'd check is the forums at 2 CPU. Not because it's a dual processor board, but there's a lot of good techies there (and why I frequent the board a lot) who would probably have a better answer than I can give.
