x8 Remote MXI connection causes conflicts with my PCI slot on my Dell Precision T3600

[blakney]

Be aware that there are only two "true" x8 slots in the T3600 and I am 98% sure the T5600 is the same. There are two other slots that are physically x8 slots but only wired as x4 slots. If you have a RAID card (H310 or H710) then Dell populated all of your ture x8 slots for you (video card in one and RAID in the other).

You will have to move the RAID to the x8 physical / x4 electrical slot and then popuplate the x8 to get the MXI Express to work. Note : the RAID may suffer from degraded perfomance depending on the number of drives, etc.

[DFGray]

The Dell T3600 had a couple of issues that have been recently resolved.  Download and install the latest video and PERC-H310 drivers, then update the BIOS to A09 to solve them.

1. The computer would bluescreen when coming out of hibernate or sleep.  This was caused by a bug in the PERC-H310 driver that was exposed when NVIDIA fixed a bug in their video driver for the NVS300 to correct a security issue.  The latest video and PERC drivers on the Dell website will cure this issue.
2. The computer would not enumerate all PCI devices.  This was cured with BIOS A08, which gave you the option to enumerate more devices.  Unfortunately, it introduced the next issue.
3. The computer would bluescreen with RAID 1 or RAID 5 configurations and BIOS A08.  This was cured with BIOS A09.

[chall]

I had A11 as my BIOS version, I had set the enumeration to 256.  I tried the whole reinstalling the compatibility software and the DIP switch settings, but never did get it working how I wanted.  My solution was getting a T5500, which solved my problem.  I would try a few other things just to be helpful to others that have problems, but it isn't convenient at this time to do some of that troubleshooting.

[blakney]

Thanks for the update. I will put this in my head / knowledge base when we roll out this platform to more T3600s. Right now I am running without the H310 and using Intel's RAID solution (without noticeable problems.)