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rjmoeller

14 Posts

28118

September 5th, 2006 15:00

Broadcom NetExtreme 57xx random failures in Optiplex GX280's

We have several GX280's here at lately we have started seeing some failures with the onboard nic's. The nic is the Broadcom NetExtreme 57xx gigabit ethernet adpater. The failure we have seen is that when the pc's is first powered on in the morning the nic will not initialize. Once Windows comes up it does not see that there is a nic in the system. Rebooting does not fix this. Sometimes it gives an error message of PCI express ethernet bridge has failed, sometimes it does not. The fix that i was given by Dell Gold Support was to unplug the nic, disable it in the bios, save & exit, unplug the pc from the power, plug it back in, reenable the nic in the bios, save 7 exit, plug the network cable back in and boot up. Now this has fixed the problem everytime, but I can't help but feel this is just a work around.

Does anyone know what could be causing this, if there is a permanent solution for it, and what that solution is? Any help you could give me would be appreciated.

PS. The bios on all of the pc's that I have seen this failure is out of date. Could upgrading to the latest take care of the problem?

mburd

48 Posts

September 5th, 2006 20:00

Guess what?? You are a victim of Dell's hardware problems. We had many of these that had the same issue. It was not a capacitor problem either. REinstalling the drivers and chipsets will not solve this problem for good. I had Dell tech support come out and replace Motherboards also. Did not work. I ended up placing PCI NICS in the troubled machines and since that day, everything was fine. I found out from our Sales person that there was a problem with the NIC Broadcom chipset. Instead of having them come out for each machine, I had them send PCI NICS for each machine that we ordered -- at less than $5 a NIC at their cost, this was the best solution for all intented. I have placed the NICS in each machine and they work flawlessly. I would suggest that you do the same.

stonent

823 Posts

September 6th, 2006 14:00

280's can have bad capacitors too. But really if it is under warranty, dell should replace the boards. I had the same exact error on a 520 and dell replaced the board.

rjmoeller

14 Posts

September 6th, 2006 17:00

How often did you have the NIC faiolures before you had Dell replace the mobo's and have you had any since?

stonent

823 Posts

September 10th, 2006 14:00

Never have had them before that one time.

speedstep

8 Wizard

 • 

47K Posts

September 10th, 2006 17:00

There needs to be more detail as to what is really going on.
One of the techs mis diagnosed the DHCP server running out of addresses
as bad nics. Put in a new nic with new mac address and viola it works again
until others come in and logon and use up all the addresses.

The real fix was to allocate more addresses.

Sometimes what "fixes" the problem is not really addressing what is going on.

The other bad nic theory shot down was CAT3 vs CAT5.
Cat3 works fine when you force it to run at 10 meg HALF DUPLEX.
And will even be tolerant of not having proper pairs 1234 VS 1236
wires but BREAKS when going to 100 meg full duplex on the same wire.

mburd

48 Posts

September 10th, 2006 17:00

Dell on-board NICS have had problems in the past. All you need to do is read the Network forum for the 240, 260, 270, 280 for towers, and SFF. Failures range from outright failure to not connecting to a particular device, or errors in I'net tasks. Try the inexpensive route(PCI) then evaluate for yourself.

rjmoeller

14 Posts

September 11th, 2006 12:00

There was nothing on the networking forum concerning gx280's that I could find that is related to my issue.  Somehow I doubt just going the route of putting in pci Nic's will fly with my manager considering we have the extended warranty on these.  I'm pretty sure the problem isn't cabling since all of ours is either cat5 or cat6 and the issue isn't a dropped connection, it's a outright failure of the Nic at the bus level.

rjmoeller

14 Posts

September 29th, 2006 14:00

Update for this issue.
After upgrading the bios on all of the GX280's on campus to A08 we had another PCIE NIC bridge failure this morning. While reinitialization cleared the issue we have decided to have Dell replace the motherboard. Hopefully we will be getting a newer mobo that this issue will not resurface on.

Doug Lubey of L1

6 Posts

January 19th, 2009 18:00

having similar problem on the DELL OPTIPLEX T3400 computers which we purchased 10/15/2008...and installed on 1/1/2009.

 

Please see my posts that I have made to this similar problem:

http://en.community.dell.com/forums/p/19253118/19412854.spx#19412854

M.Arslan

2 Posts

October 20th, 2012 21:00

pls explain in simple language please

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