Dell Optiplex, nics in both PCIe slots?

[rungekutta]

Hi all,
I'll be getting 10Gbit wan soon so will be looking at upgrading my current Qotom i5 (which has worked well!). I've been on these forums before discussing options, including Epyc embedded etc.

I've got one specific question regarding Dell Optiplex SFF, as these seem a popular choice. They actually have two PCIe slots, one x16 and one x4. From what I can tell this is unusual, as many consumer/business PCs only have 1x16 for graphics and then x1 slots for other stuff. I am planning to put a Chelsio 10Gb SFP+ in one slot and Intel i350-T4 in the other, so I need both slots.

Does anyone know if this would work, or if the Dell is hardwired to assume that the x16 card is a GPU? I've seen some reports like that for earlier versions.

[lilsense]

you need 4 10Gig ports... I think you'd have a bigger issue from processing the 10Gig rather than the pcie ports.

[rungekutta]

Hah, true, but no I need 1x 10Gb port for wan, and 1x for lan. As for the rest I like to keep dmz, guest/IoT networks on their own nics in the firewall for simplicity, but there 1Gb is enough. I guess I could solve it with vlans in opnsense and trunking all networks into the same physical port, but so far I have avoided that.

[rungekutta]

Does anyone know if this would work, or if the Dell is hardwired to assume that the x16 card is a GPU? I've seen some reports like that for earlier versions.

I can answer my own question here after receiving guidance on a Dell forum. Unfortunately the PCIe x16 port is for GPU and not general purpose. There's only the single x4 port available for general purpose.

Shame. Would have been a killer setup otherwise, in terms of performance per $ and in a small and quiet package.

Guess I need to look at server motherboards for this, or an appliance like DEC850.

[Antaris]

Second hand DL360p G8 or PowerEdge R620 are obvious choice here if the noise is not a big concern. DL360p often comes with 2x10G SFP+, R620 usually have only 4x1G...

[rungekutta]

Thanks. Noise unfortunately is a concern... this is for domestic use and the fibre terminates in the bedroom (cupboard) where I currently have the Qotom. I could of course trunk WAN somewhere else and then back out again (got servers in the cellar..). But am also considering a quiet Ryzen build. Should be doable with careful selection of parts (chassis and cpu fan). Something like the ASRock X470D4U has enough pci slots for both a quad gig nic and dual sfp+ 10Gb. And I've got those nics already.

[Mr. Me]

Actually you can use both PCIe slots.
I just installed opnsense for the first time.  I used a small form factor Dell Optiplex 7060.  It has one PCIe gen3 x4 slot and one PCIe gen3 x16 slot.  It has 1Gb ethernet port on motherboard.  I took two Intel 1GbE PCIe x4 NICs. Placed one in each slot. Booted into BIOS and it shows "Ethernet" in both slots.  Next I tried to boot from USB drive, it didn't work until I went back into BIOS and disabled secure boot.  Now it booted from USB.  Next during install it didn't show the NVME drive as an option for installation.  I went back into BIOS and changed the SATA settings from RAID to AHCI. Now It showed the NVME drive as an option to install opnsense with ZFS > Stripe.

After installation. It shows all three 1GbE ports.  The one built into the motherboard was em0 and the two NICs in PCIe x4 and x16 show up as igb0 and igb1.
I was able to assign them as LAN or WAN and I could connect to all of them. 

My next experiment is to get a dual port 10GBASE-T PCIe x8 NIC and put that in the x16 slot.

I once put a graphics card into the HP ProLiant DL360P gen8 PCIe slot and the fans just kicked up so much noise. I thought forget it and removed it.

[chemlud]

Sorry, didn't see this before. Have here various Optiplex SFF for years, all with 2x Intel cards for NICs, 1Gbit or 1.25Gbit per NIC, doing perfectly fine. The Optis come with built-in GPU and the x16 PCIe is NOT limited to GPU in my machines...

[chemlud]

To whom it may concerns:

In a fresh bought Optiplex SFF 7070 with UEFI boot there is apparently a problem with PCI-e cards in general. Bought a 4x NIC card (working fine in older Opti SFF)

https://www.amazon.de/dp/B01H6NE4X2?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title

but the Opti 7070 SFF won't boot, tried both slots. Simply blinking with power/diagnostic LEDs every 3 sec. no POST, no nothing.

PCI-e is 3.0 according to Dell docs, the card is PCI-e 2.1 according to the product description.

https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/de-de/optiplex-7070-sff/opti7070_sff_setup_specs/system-board-drive-connectors?guid=guid-a828ebb5-0563-42e5-826a-ed9ee262d30b&lang=en-us

PAIN...

The interwebs are not very helpful on this...

[chemlud]

...needless to say that the 4xNIC card works just fine in a Dell Precision workstation... :-(

[chemlud]

...a 19-year-old Quadro NVS 285

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadro

is detected happily by the 7070 SFF in the long PCI slot. Last Opti I bought, well done Dell, assume that is what they intended with this trash.

[Greg_E]

HP T740 or T755 with a quad Intel x710 card (low profile) and a few gigabit SFP modules. You can add in an a+e Intel i226-v card if you take out the wifi, and you can install the Realtek optional drivers and use the on board gigabit NIC. I've seen the x710 cards for around $150usd on ebay, not sure if they are real though.

You can also use an older x520 card, but you will only get a dual port from what I can find, I have Supermicro branded cards in a bunch of t740 and they work fine. I haven't really tested the a+e card yet, but it shows up in ESXi 8.0.3 and connects back to my gigabit network, just no real traffic on them yet.

[chemlud]

Thanks for reply, but Dell is the way to go here (still...),maybe this will change in the future, but not there yet.

Don't want to solve this by throwing more hardware on the problem, want to find a way to use the Opti 7070 SFF for an OPNsense with 5 to 9 NICs. If that doesn't work, the Opti is a brick for me, no use case whatsoever at the moment other than OPNsense...

Would try playing around with the BIOS to expose PCIe choice (PCIe 2 maybe does the trick?). But currently no time to play around. So: Don't buy 7070 SFF for OPNsense, might not  work with additional NICs. With only the internal NIC OPNsense boots just fine with this box.