Gateway 980 server freeze?

[rjent at rjent.pair.com]

Greetings,

I am having trouble with a new Gateway 980 server. I am running fresh
cvsup RELENG_4, kernel is stock except for maxusers set to 512, ipfw
enabled, and smp enabled. System information is as follows:

Motherboard information is located at:

http://support.gateway.com/s/Servers/COMPO/MOTHERBD/4000791/4000791mv.shtml

The raid card is a LSI U320 LVD 2-Channel SCSI Array Controller. Box
configure with raid5 +hotswap

Symptoms:

Box doing internal operations all well. Upon placing load on device
through NIC box freezes. Reproducible via a scp of tar files from any
server on same switch. After box freezes you can eject a drive from the
raid5 array and no alarms no trigger hot swap, no nothing.

Additional information:

Have replaced all components with RAID as well as disabled motherboard nic
and added Intel® 82544 Gigabit Ethernet Controller card.

Have upgraded to latest motherboard bios.

Solutions that seem to cause the problem to go away:

If you plug server box with stock nic into a 10mb port no freeze occurs.

Replace nic with a standard pci (I used 3com905b) and not use a pci-x type
nic all well and no freeze.

I believe that it is an issue with the pci-x on motherboard.

Any known issues or ideas on how to resolve?

Many thanks.
----------
RJEnt
Providing Solutions w/FreeBSD