DO NOTE, PARTS ALREADY BOUGHT, THIS IS JUST A CURIOSITY!
Sorry about this all, just a curiosity.
I’ve been re-purposing my old computers, running them as test FreeNAS servers. Because I’m using HBA’s that need the largest PCI slot, I wanted to have a simple GPU for basic purposes only. I have found the right GPU’s that are fanless, have tiny memory and do the trick, but it was a real pain looking for them. The size of the PCI slot doesn’t seem to have a specific description. Manuals only describe them as "PCI Express x1 slots…but you look for them and the x16 larger slot cards seem to come up in searches too. It’s a little strange!
So TL;DR, Just wondering if anyone knew what these little things were called? Thanks!
It’s funny, because when I was searching on online auctions for second hand units, I did specify 1x slots, but the 16x long PCI cards still came up - it was most annoying!
Spot on that FreeNAS only needs the GPU for the install, but I thought it was nice to have a GPU always plugged in, so I can do any non GUI things when needed. I do SSH into it, but it’s easier to look at the main screen when it gets huffy over something! Of course once I find no purpose in it and to reduce heat in the case, I will pull it out for sure.
To my surprise, drive speeds with the HBA plugged into the 16x has been very good, around 100MB over 1G network, so that’s nice (in mirror, RAIDZ1 and striped). Internal should be higher of course, but I’ve yet to test that. This is only a test rig, the final board only has 16X PCI slots and is more than up to the task…I’m actually looking forward to using it, especially as it has more than the 2 cores I currently have, and VM’s are quite painful with only 1 core (oddly assigning 2 cores disables the mouse/keyboard).
I can find some single slot GPUs on ebay on the cheap, I paid 14$ for a dell R5 240
EDIT: Ooooh you want a 1x GPU, yeah those are rare, there were the Nvidia Ion cards a loooong time ago
If that’s the schematic of the actual motherboard you could look for an old (ancient) PCI(non-E) graphics card too. Don’t need graphics acceleration to install FreeNAS and might be easier to get hold off than a PCI-E x1 card (and might use less power than a higher end card)
Almost all of those will be VGA-only though (well, quick Ebay search turned up a DMS-59 one…).
Oooh, nice find, thanks for that. So far I’m using cards called NVS 290’s and they do the job well - and have no fan, which is nice at the moment, as until recently, I ran them next to my desk! Wow, that card is nice and cheap though eh!
We sacrificed an old soldering iron to melt away the back of a 1X slot on an old board so we could put in an x2 network card. Worked great at the slower speed. Good chance you slip and destroy the slot though, so beware.
