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video driver for PowerEdge t110 II with Matrox card
In what may turn out to be a boneheaded move, I bought a PowerEdge T110 II server for a small church client of mine. 4 computers in total so I loaded a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate and set up a peer to peer file sharing server for them. About a month later I started having some video display issues so went to update the driver only to find that Dell only supports true server software on this machine. The display card is an onboard Matrox G200eW (Winbond) device and Matrox told me that the driver would have to come from Dell. So no Windows 7 driver seems to be available from either source. I read other traffic here that some people have been able to install aftermarket video cards but that is something Dell support says will not work. Anyone else found a solution to this issue?
Thanks.
Michael
skylarking
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548 Posts
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January 3rd, 2014 17:00
Michael, the PE T110 is a nice machine but is unsupported by Dell in your configuration as you are using Windows7 and PCIe graphics.
The only downside is that if you have OS issues, you're on your own as Dell will only warrant hardware problems since it is used outside their certified configuration (server OS, integrated graphics). This means that it's up to you to find appropriate drivers, fault find issues, etc for the Win7 configuration you are using. Luckily, Dell workstation workstations with the same chipsets can be a useful source of driver downloads in this regard, especially the downloads for managing the raid configuration (as the server version does not work on client os) but i don't know of G200e specific workstation downloads to point you to...
But back to the hardware graphics issue, luckily Dell has allowed some BIOS options and a motherboard PCIe x8/x16 slot (slot2) that is helpful if you need better graphics.
Firstly, within the Integrated Device Screen of your BIOS, you should see "Embedded Video Controller" which is set to Enabled by "Default". You can't change this value unless you first install a video card into the system. Once installed, you can now set "Embedded Video Controller" to "Disabled" and plug your monitor into your new PCIe video card. At boot you will now see the output from the new video card.
If you don't see any video output from the new video card (you plugged the monitor into the new card didn't you) you can clear cmos settings and return to default values (which is integrated video) - just make sure you remember which other bios settings you have changed from their default values, if any and reset them before booting the system again.
If video is seen at boot, then you need to install the OS specific PCIe video card drivers for the card to work optimally in your OS (Win7U).
The hardware issues to take note of are:
1. the motherboard is only designed to feed 25W to the PCIe slots so you need a low power (approximately 25W) video card.
2. the power supply does not have graphics card auxiliary power connectors so you need a low power (approximately 25W) graphics card.
3. the total power/heat that can be consumed/produced by all PCIe cards is limited to 95W, so be aware of this limit and all the other cards installed in your system, see the manual for details.
To sum up, you can install any low power 25W video card in the T110 II and Disable Embedded Video Controller within BIOs before installing the video card drivers within the OS. Should work a treat and give you the full aero experience.
In my case, i had an old XFX GF7600GS that i installed into my PE T610 running Win7Ultimate. Such a card use <30W max and cost 10's of dollars at computer swap meets :)
Hope you found this info helpful :emotion-1:
baanpro
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November 3rd, 2014 15:00
I know this is an old post, but WHY do this??? Michael, you should try looking into Techsoup to pick up a supported OS for the T110 at a very low cost. Why try and use a true server model to be a "server" in a workgroup and install Windows 7? That set up could become an unreliable solution for them, as you can already see, by the video issues/drivers not available for Win7. The cost difference is not worth the headaches, IMHO, and the end users will surely appreciate a more long term, reliable solution.