The motherboard in my old home server died whilst moving house and I have recently acquired a Dell Poweredge 2900 Tower Server.
It is great as a NAS but I would like to add some GPU power so I can do some video encoding.
I know I’ll need a PCIe 8x to 16x adapter to get something reasonable to work with.
Would something like a Quadro K5200 work in this or would I be better off with something older such as a quadro 4000 or is that still too new?
Any advice or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.
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So long it has PCIe, those cards are going to be backwards compatible with it. Whether you’ll be able to get their full potential performance depends on the rest of the system. That’s a mid to late 2000s server. What are the other specifications of it?
2 x Dual-Core Xeon 5000.
48GB DDR4 667 MHz RAM.
Dual 930W PSULike the other commenters said, the performance per watt isn’t great but if your power is cheap, that won’t matter. You should be able to get quad core Xeon chips on eBay for super cheap (I bought a pair of E5440s for $16 I think). You got plenty of RAM already for a server of that era. Does it have a PCIe power plug inside? You’ll need that for those two GPUs.
I can tell you you’re gonna see some real bad performance per watt out of it.
As long as you can power the GPU you should probably be fine.
I mean what do you want to be doing with it? If there’s a specific task in mind then the only time a GPU can be too new is if it doesn’t support the encoders/decoders you need. Most encoding work should be done by the GPU, but your CPU isn’t doing nothing.
Also you can just cut the end of the slot off (assuming didnt come factory like that) and slot the GPU directly in.