GPU on Poweredge R630

Hi Chris,

Is it possible to attach an external GPU to PE R630?

Thanks

Hello,

I've never come across an R630 using an external GPU before. Probably eGPU will work on workstations solutions. But if anyone has tried this in the community for rackmount servers especially R630, it might help. I haven't come across a document that officially supports eGPU. I'm not sure if such accelerators can work on this server. Maybe those who built interesting systems for mining somehow tried it, I'm not sure.

Updating here will help others if you learn more.

Let us know how it goes!

I picked this up for my R630

After a quick test with the lid off and some shelves for support 

(wasn’t sure if the riser needed power as well as the gpu but both had 8-pin power ports that fit my 750W gold PSU that used to power my previous home lab so I plugged a lead into both)

And success! After fiddling with the BIOS to swap which lane I had bifurcated; as well as finding the right drivers for my kernel and card, nvidia-smi shows the full card info and it can be used for transcoding and more. I use it for plex transcoding, tdarr jobs using handbrake to auto convert videos I drop in specified directories to a format for our car infotainment systems to easily cycle through shows and movies for the kids on long drives and I’ve even gotten gdm working the gpu hdmi and dp connections 160hz 2k on two and 60hz 2k at once though it could handle 4k that just makes the UI too small on my 32" monitors. I didn’t test gaming on it much as I only used it to play a beta game from steam made for windows I launch with wine64 since I’m running Ubuntu headless server.

And since it works it became permanent, I used metal shears to cut a slot in the back of the lid over the PCIe lanes avoiding the lid sensor groove and such just enough for the PCIe riser cables and power plug to fit through. It’s racked up now but still using the shelves for the time being, I need to design a cover with a groove that slots into hole with backplane slots and possibly cutouts for the riser cable extension ports to be screwed into that can be 3d printed but ones that’s done it’ll look like a muscle car with a big engine sticking out of its hood.

Oh and the silver rectangle is an Asus 4 slot m.2 ssd bay which I have working with 2 ssds already after bifurcating the right lane in the bios which confused me a bit because it seemed like they were labeled backwards in bios since I thought 1 was closest to the PSUs but I had to bifurcate 1 to 4x4x4x4 to get the second m.2 drive to show up. This prompted me to set slot 2 back to x16 since that should mean it’s the one the GPU was using which seemed to be working the same when it was set at 4x4x4x4 though. Though now with it set to x16 a hardware scan shows the GPU only using half width. This doesn’t matter much since I’m just using it for minor stuff now but I’m curious if I have the slots backwards or something just haven’t had time to fiddle with it more and left it in the current working state for now. It’s also work noting I didn’t do the same scan when hat slot was bifurcated, checking the ssd drives were showing up properly is what prompted me to run it after getting those to show up and I didn’t flip anything back after that since I’ve been busy.

@NoGecko​ Ok, so I was trying to find the same topic. And now as I see you just made a post and oh dear... Same server, same graphic card I ordered... Thank god someone did this. I bought the pcie riser and will try to do with it using old 800w psu. 

I am happy that you had success.