I was reading the card spec today (which did not help much) but got to wondering about the embedded NIC.
The thought I had was that the dual NIC's maybe loading Boot Option ROMs. (There is not a lot of option rom space since it has to be loaded hooks in lower memory)
If this is the case, you can disable the PCI oproms in BIOS setup, but it is a little tricky
With one card installed you need to:
- Boot and go into BIOS setup
- Select Advance - PCI configuration - PCI oprom
- Disable the option rom.
- Power down,
- Install the next card
- Repeat from step 1 until all cards are installed and Oprom's disabled,
The Oprom disable tab is kind of a catch 22.
The tab only shows up BIOS detects and configures a card during POST that contains an option rom, but if too much Oprom space is used, BIOS can't configure the card so it never shows up and hence you can't disable it either.
May not be the issue, but I figured it is worth a try.