Using something other than a graphics card in PCIe5 x16 slot?

Hardware Hub
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I bought two similar i7-12700 based workstations from HP and Dell (HP Z2 Tower G9 Workstation HP Z2 G9 Tower Workstation - Wolf Pro Security Edition and Dell Precision 3660 Tower Workstation Precision 3660 Tower Workstation : Computer Workstations | Dell USA ) and am using the integrated Intel UHD Graphics 770 for video. For my application I had planned to put a PCIe storage card in the PCIe5 x16 slot. I’ve tried a few RAID cards and an NVMe drive in PCIe form factor. When I put any of these cards in the x16 slot the PC just hangs on boot in the BIOS displaying the HP/Dell logo forever. These cards work fine in any of the other slots, but those other slots are x4 maximum electrically. The RAID cards I want to use are electrically x8 or x16 so to get the full bandwidth I want to use the real x16 slot which is vacant since I use the integrated graphics.

I had assumed a PCI slot was a PCI slot. Does anyone know if anything other than graphics cards are supported in the x16 slot on these systems? Both HP and Dell say no, but won’t tell me why. If not, why is this slot different? Any workarounds?

Thanks.

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Being they’re from OEMs, they may be locked to a small count of supported SKUs, for such peripherals

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Yes, that is certainly a possibility. They do have a list of supported devices. I can understand they can only guarantee what they have validated, but I wasn’t expecting both to just hang. I did try disabling everything I could think of including lowering the PCIe speed and nothing got it working in the x16 slot.

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