Dell Precision 5820 with SuperMicro AOC-SLG3-4E4T Expansion card

Hello all,

I recently purchased a SuperMicro AOC-SLG3-4E4T Expansion Card to integrate into my Dell Precision 5820 X-Series Tower with Motherboard Model No. 0X75JG version A00 for the purpose of installing a ZMicro TranzPak 1 Four Drive Docking Bay (TP1-4XI-SA) into my machine. I am running Windows 10 Pro and have an Intel Core i9-10980XECPU@3GHZ with 64Gb of DDR4 RAM. I installed the card into my machine and connected the (4) oculink connectors from  the ZMicro drive bay to the SuperMicro Expansion Card but my machine does not recognize the drive bays.

The SuperMicro Expansion Card came with a CBL-CDAT-0674 “4 pin to 4 pin I2C cable”, but our motherboard does not have this connection. In addition, our motherboard does not have the “JI2C1 and JI2C2” described in the installation manual to enable the SMBus. Step (8) highlighted below…

I also emailed SuperMicro and their response was this: 

"The AOC-SLG3-4E4T retimer NVME AOC only tested on certain Supermicro motherboards, so we don’t know if there is any compatible issue with your system or not.  If you are using non Supermicro motherboard, you must make sure your Motherboard BIOS/CPU supports bifurcation (x4x4x4x4) in order for the card to get recognized.  Also, the Oculink port on the card needs to match the port number on your device.  Example: NVME0 <-> NVME0, otherwise it would not work."

The Dell Tower and ZMicro Drive bay are permanent fixtures and must remain.

Can this setup work, or what do you recommend to resolve this problem?  Does my Dell Precision 5820 support x4x4x4x4 bifurication? Are there any another Oculink Card(s) on the market that would work with this setup or is there a way to get the current SuperMicro Expansion Card to work?

Thank you.