I decided to re-write this looking at what i wrote last night, I was evidentally effected by the inhilation of melted plastic fumes.

I was recently sent a link to dell.com where there was an offer on their servers, making a dual core xeon with 4gb of ram etc.. dirt cheap. So without any hesitation I wipped the card out and a week later my brandnew machine arrived, the reasoning to myself was that this was going to be my new workstation. I stuck in a vista install disk and off I went, didn’t take long and a fresh install and a new machine was there ready to use. The poweredge comes with an onboard ATI es1000, which honestly is bloody awful. So without any real investigation i went out and purchased a gfx card allowing me to hopefully have some sort of graphics acceleration in my machine. New GFX card in hand I opened up my dell machine and found there was no where inside the machine for this card to fit…

This is the inside of the poweredge, you can see the two white pci (regular) slots. then the three black pci-e slots are (x1,x4,x8). Which obviously makes you wonder where a gfx card is going to fit, x16 is the normal for gfx cards. The other sized gfx cards are either:

  • Rare as rocking horse poo
  • Overpriced
  • Crap

After lots of research it turns out that pci-e is backwards/forwards compatible, in that a smaller card will fit in a larger slot… and a larger card CAN fit in a smaller slot..

This is an extract from wikipedia (trusted source ;) )

  • a PCIe card will physically fit (and work correctly) in any slot that is at least as large as it is (e.g. an x1 sized card will work in any sized slot);
  • a slot of a large physical size (e.g. x16) can be wired electrically with fewer lanes (e.g. x1, x4, or x8) as long as it provides the power and ground connections required by the larger physical slot size.

In both cases, PCIe will negotiate the highest mutually supported number of lanes.

Obviously the biggest problem is that the slots have plastic molded end pieces etc .. which mean that in theory only the correct card will fit in the correct slot. This meant using a knife and a bit of messing around i needed to adjust one of my other pci-e slots. So carefully i removed the back of the slot with a sharp craft knife and then cleaned it up using a heated screwdriver.. (being careful not to get any hot plastic on the pins) and low and behold.. i know have a working pc with GFX…

Once the card was in, moved the cables over the card, gave it a boot and off we go..

Benchmarks have been relatively impressive so far, and the system has been very stable.