I have a pair of Broadcom NetXtreme 57711 10GbE cards. I put one in a Dell R710; it boots with the card fine, the OS (CentOS 7) recognizes it, and all seems well. However, when I put the other card in an R730xd (also running CentOS), something unexpected happens: the R730xd's fans kick into high speed as soon as the system starts to boot the OS, and run continuously at high speed no matter what is happening. The fans do not run at full speed when interacting with the Lifecycle Controller or the BIOS screens. They only start spinning at full speed when the computer starts to boot the OS and before the OS comes up, so it doesn't seem to be a function of the OS.
I've updated the R730xd's firmware to the latest versions available, I've tried setting the CPU performance profiles in the BIOS, and I've tried setting the thermal profile in the iDRAC, but nothing seems to change the behavior; the system always goes into full-on jet-engine mode. Googling reveals at least one other person encountering similar fan behavior related to adding a PCI card to an R730xd (though it's unclear whether it's the same card – it doesn't appear to be).
What am I doing wrong? More importantly, can this behavior be changed, so that the fans do not stay stuck at full speed?
Best Answer
So after the chat in the comments I have some probably bad news.
Dell hardware that ships with a server as a configured item - which IIRC those broadcoms where - is almost never comparable between generations. Dell tends to put custom firmware that hooks into all their management systems on these things.
So the short of it is the part is probably not comparable, won't be supported, and will cause weird issues like what you are seeing.
Note: this doesn't apply to parts sold through their accessories catalog, on parts shipped as part of a dell server build.