Dell X710-T4L and NBASE-T
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Heads up for anyone else out there who runs into this: The Dell X710-T4L card shows up in pfsense as expected and works great with 10Gbps and 1Gbps but does not advertise or sync at 2.5Gbps or 5Gbps.
I did a lot of searching and found a thread where someone else experienced the same thing in Linux. They never got NBASE-T to work and ended up purchasing an Intel card instead.
If there's any way to cross-flash these Dell cards to Intel firmware to enable the missing speeds, I'd love to know.
I suppose there's a reason the Dell cards are significantly cheaper (I paid $325) used. Not saying it's a bad NIC and not saying it's not a genuine part. But it's not exactly the same as the Intel counterpart.
Hope this saves someone else some time, if not money. The X710-T4L seems like a best-in-class NIC but if you want to use NBASE-T skip the Dell version.
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@whosmatt For cross flashing read entire thread at level1techs forum. I just did it last week on Dell x710-DA4 card and it works.
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@753951 I cannot thank you enough for this. My card is flashed and works perfectly now.
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One more bit of odd behavior from this card in case anyone has any ideas: When installed in my system, which is a HP slimline desktop S01-PF1013W with a Pentium Gold G6400T, one of the RAM slots is effectively disabled. The system acts as if it has no RAM installed if only that slot is populated and has half the RAM expected available if both are populated.
I've seen this once before, with another Dell NIC, that one a Broadcom 5720 dual port 1Gbps NIC with PCIe x1. That time I never figured out that it was the RAM slot that was the culprit so I just moved ahead with a different NIC.
It's not a deal breaker as I can live with just 4GB RAM until I scrounge up an 8GB stick. Just wondering if anyone else has seen anything like this before. I never have, except with this system.