SOLARFLARE SFC-9120 Will Spin Up The Fans On R740xd

This is just an observation and public service announcement. If you have the Solarflare SFC-9120 10Gb SFP+ card installed in an R740xd it will spin up the fans and be louder than it needs to be. Most likely due to iDRAC not being able to read the temperature of the card. This is common with Solarflare cards.

Here’s a screenshot of the fan speed at idle load without the card:

And here’s a shot with the card installed:

At 48% PWM the server is quite loud even with high performance fans installed.