Hi,
I am planning to buy Dell a PowerEdge R7515/R7525 server and hoping to throw in a consumer grade RTX 2070 card for occasional GPU code testing. Does anyone have any experience as far as compatibility issues of R7515/R7525 or other PowerEdge servers with consumer-grade cards? Would it work or do I have to go through the more expensive Tesla/Quadro path?
Thanks in advance.
You need to make sure you can power the card as the PSU on poweredge stuff is not standard with extra cables laying around (rackmount/HA). If you’re buying this new and can customize it talk to your Dell rep.
Secondly, you need to get a blower style cooler for the GPU because open air designs choke and suffocate in rackmount gear (most designs).
You don’t have to get enterprise GPUs but you will lose out on certain creature comforts. Like depending on how the pcie riser backplane is implemented you might have to spring for the EVGA adapter which moves the cables to the side.
Not to mention there is firmware on rackmount series which with always crank the system fans to 100% so if this isn’t going to be in a dedicated server room environment you can probably forget about it as full tilt is VERY loud.
I would suggest you go with a T series instead of R series unless you know what you’re doing.
Everything you are saying is true; however, the cpu fans blow so hard that any card is likely to be so overwhelmed by the directionality and volume of the airflow that blower vs non may not matter.
There’s a good chance you can modify this, though it would detract from the above effect. I have modded it on a PE 2950 III with no problems, aside from the expected heat increase.
Thank you very much for the detailed response. Why do you think R series would be problematic (I opt for it due to cost/core)?
R means Rack, T means tower in their SKU.
In other words you’d be getting a 1U or 2U form factor.
Tbh not sure if the model you’re looking at comes in a Tower varient.
Good point about the fan speed. I know it can be hit or miss with the fans.
Since you’ve modified it could you give @gordonthree any pointers? He tried to use a gpu in a HPE and was burned by this.
I suppose. I just searched and found a few solutions for my particular server. The one that worked best was:
I don’t remember what the commands were. It’s been several years. I found it from a web search. For that server you can also replace the fans with slower ones but they don’t fit the sleds exactly so that would be a different mod; I opted for the resistors. Mine was 2U.
For the gpu, I removed the pcie risers and had to notch the back of the x8 slots to leave them open. At first, I could only fit a 1 slot card, but eventually was able to find a 2 slot card with single slot bracket and no pcie power required. The whole thing was still pretty noisy and very hot, but only just noisy enough to tolerate.
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