[geeks] Tyan Tempest Motherboard Headache

[Mark Benson]

Hi,

Well this one's got me stumped. I don't seem to have great luck with 
Xeon machines it seems.

I have a Tyan Tempest (appropriate name as it happens) i5000XL S2692 
motherboard I bought '100% working' off flea bay. It came with 2x E5320 
Xeons (4 core, 1.86GHz 80W TDP). I bought some 80W rated heat-sinks and 
some 6-32 nyloc nuts to bolt them down to (as I didn't have a 
motherboard tray with the required mounts).

I rigged it up to a 500W PSU with a suitable 8pin EPS power feed and... 
nothing. Black screen, fans run flat out. I tried and tried but no dice 
was had, until I got it to go and it limped up as far as the BIOS screen 
then flaked out. It went through another bout of not working then limped 
up again on one CPU and reported a negative temperature in the other 
slot. I figured maybe I had a faulty CPU and took it out.

Hey Presto! It works fine on one CPU. I've got 2 more E5320s and tried 
one of those, same result. The heat-sink on the working CPU is thermally 
functional (under stress tests it gets HOT) so I don't think my 
attachment/paste technique is bad.

While sulking in 2 CPU full fans mode, no chips get hot or even warm. It 
just sits there, and I've left it on for several minutes.

I am kinda stumped. I've tried a few PSUs, up to 650W rated redundants 
from the PowerEdge 1800, with no different results. I'm pretty resigned 
to using it on one socket (which it seems fine with) and accepting it's 
a faulty board at this stage.

Any ideas?

-- 

Mark