Graphics card on ML350 G5

[Mike Westkamper]

I cannot seem to add a high-performance graphics card to my ML350 G5. Will this riser work in that capacity?

HP ML350G5 2Slot PCI X Riser Kit (435670-B21)

[Matti_Kurkela · Accepted solution]

Most current high-performance graphics cards (GPUs) are PCI Express (PCIe) cards. The others use the "legacy" standard known as AGP.

ML350 G5 has PCIe slots, but they are x4 or at most x8 variety: most high-performance GPUs require a PCIe x16 slot. Of course, PCIe cards are supposed to work with lower-bandwidth slots too, but that limits the performance of the card. I would not expect high-performance GPU manufacturers to do much testing with limited-performance configurations, so you would easily find yourself in the land of "unsupported".

PCI-X is a faster/wider version of PCI for servers: I don't know of any common high-performance graphics card that would use a PCI-X slot.

PCI-X is backwards compatible with plain old PCI, but I would not call any PCI graphics card "high performance" today.

Most high-performance GPUs also require more current than a standard PCIe slot can supply. That necessitates an extra power feed from the PSU to the card, but such a power feed is not often available in server-style machines.

Trying to convert a rack-mount server into a graphics monster machine is like trying to adapt a Formula-1 car for a gravel-road rally: different roles call for different designs.

MK

[Mike Westkamper]

Thanks for the response. And I agree, different machines. We have a job to do some graphics development and image processing and the data sets are on this machine. The performance would be best if I could tap it directly instead of over a LAN. We configured this box with 2 4x chips and a SAS array to max the processing. Running the graphics from the data on this machine over the LAN is jerky at best.

And I understand the metaphor, I do some off-road competition.

It just seemed that the riser card might make the adaption needed. Hard to tell from the pictures and specs.

Thanks again,

Mike