Hey, I am trying to pick an GPU for for my IBM X3850 X5 4U rack server. I can do full-heigth 1 or 2 slot GPU. But probably 2 slot would be preferable even though I do loose an PCIe-slot, but the one next to the X16-slot is wired as x4 in terms of PCIe, and I have plenty of space left for other stuff. The slot on the server is an PCIe 2.0 x16, and on the photo below, it is the top slot.
Source:
I am also thinking of buying an adapter cable (I think the source on the server side is ATX EPS12V), so I should be able to setup power for either 1-2 PCIe 8pin or 6 pin.
I have been thinking that I need a GPU for VM graphics acceleration, and then also maybe some light LLM projects. I have been banging my head against the desk with how slow my windows server with an real Desktop environment(I know, this is for my lab, bite me).
I am running proxmox VE 8.4 on the server as the hypervisor.
I have been thinking something like used nvidia GRID K1, but I would like to hear what other people would suggest!
Well if it’s really just for passing to a vm for display you can use whatever your heart tells you so a grid k1 is fine.
Even cards that have a cooling fan that would not blow air the same direction would not be a problem so I’d say you can use what you already have at home.
Fir the eps power vonnector, you can find adapters.
Maybe, maybe not. There is a pair of 80mm server fans not far from the Pcie-slots.
And I had totally forgotten that I do have an XFX Radeon HD6870 with 1GB DDR5 sitting on my self, so probably starting with that one, and then upgrading if I need more power.
Hmm, IDK if I want to spend that kind of money to my lab atm. Thanks for the idea, but IDK if I would even trust the server to provide that level of power to an PCIe-card. And also interesting question how it would perform with intel CPU’s from before 2014 through PCIe 2.0
