T410 questions

Hi

I work in computational astrophysics and am interested in purchasing
either a T410 or a T610 server as a large memory (32GB) workstation. I
need to have a few technical questions answered before I decide what
to buy, and I'm having a very hard time finding a Dell Sales Support
person, so maybe someone in this forum has answers.


1) I would like to install an NVIDIA GTX-295 graphics board in order to
experiment with CUDA and GPU computing. Is the T410 case large enough to
hold it? The dimensions of the card are: height=4.376in, length=10.5in,
width=dual-slot.

2) The T410 is spec'd with either a 525W or a 580W PSU. This is not
enough power to drive dual quad-core Xeons, multiple disks, and the
GTX-295. If I want to substitute a more powerful PSU, something like
the 870W one in the T610, what constraints do I have to meet,
i.e. what kind of PSU do I need to get, what connectors, etc.?

3) For hard disks I would like to use two 15K SAS disks in software
RAID-1 for running the operating system (Linux) and four 7.2K SATA disks
in hardware RAID-5 using the add-in PERC6/i SATA/SAS Controller.
However, when I choose this configuration in the Customize webform I get
a warning that "The Hard Drives you selected must be all same type hard
drive all SAS or SATA or SSD" and that "The Hard Drive Configuration you
selected supports one Raid 5 and requires minimum of three hard drives.
All Hard Drives must be the same size and speed."

Are there technical reasons why the configuration I envision is impossible?

4) I have several external disks with eSATA connectors. Do either of the
T410 or T610 have eSATA connectors?

5) Lastly, I produced similarly spec'd configurations for the T410 and
T610 (dual Xenon E5520, 32GB RAM, same disks, etc.) and the T610 is
about $1K more expensive. What is the reason for this price difference?

Thanks for any answers!

mike