Précision tower 7910 gpu updt

Hello,

Thank you very much for your feedback. 

What would you go for a 800$ budget? 

With the T7910 (also the T7600 and T7610) there is a finite amount of space in the card slot area.  You need to watch out for oversized and "open air" design cards.  The ideal cards to install into these machines use blower style coolers because they expel large amounts of hot air out the back of the machine.

Also, if you want to use the top PCIe ports you need a card that has the supplemental power connectors on the back end of the card.  Power connectors on the side of the card will not fit because of the side panel latch mechanism.

The big power option would be to install the Gigabyte RTX 3090 Turbo 24GB.  This is a blower style card with the power connectors on the back of the card.  the retail price is about the same as a Quadro RTX 5000 but will seriously outperform it (plus it also has NVLink if you want to pair two of them up)

For your $800 budget, your best bet would probably be to find a used GTX 1080 ti blower card, or a RTX 2080 Super blower card.

I agree with JamesJAB3.   

There is a specific PCI-E slot that you use for a large video card. Depending upon size these cards can cover up additional PCI-E slots.   If you have a dual CPU, there are two additonal PCI-E slots in the top of the case that become available.   But there's only one slot, associated with CPU 0 (the first CPU) that the graphics card fits in nicely.  And if you only have one CPU, a card can cover other slots and may prevent the use of other cards.   For example, there are add in cards for Thunderbolt 3, but they only work in the slot right next to the graphics slot.  So if you put in a 2080 or other card that covers 2 or more slots, no Thunderbolt 3.

In my machine, and I think its standard, I had two power cables.  One was a dedicated dual 6 pin, and one was a single eight pin.  I think also standard is a splitter on the 8 pin, to give you dual 6 pins.  So, standard, you have four 6 pin power cable connectors.  If you pull the splitter off, you have an eight pin and dual six pins. 

I had an old nvidia GTX 780 Ti card that I tried first.  Worked great.  Probably even adequate for light gaming.  It used the eight pin and one six pin IIRC.

I replaced it with a RTX 2080 Ti.  I think I paid $850 on ebay for that card.  I initially found an adapter that went from dual six pins to one eight pin.  So the dual eight pin power was supplied by a single eight pin cable, and a dual six pin cable with the adapter to provide a single eight pin.   I later replaced that dual 6 pin cable plus splitter with an straight, single 8 pin cable.

I think that the 3090 is wider and takes up even more slots.  If you have a single CPU (so that the upper two PCI-E slots won't work) I wouldn't go this way.  But if you do get the 3090 you should be able to power it using a dual 8 pin (possibly with a 2x-8pin x 1x 12 pin) cable setup.  

As I say, I like my 2080 Ti.  I think, though, that the 2080 Super may have a much better price/performance ratio.

The T7600, T7610 and T7910 when equipped with the 1300w PSU have connectors on the Power Distribution board for 3x 8 pin PCIe power connectors.  Each of those can be split to 2x 6 pin connectors.

So you could install the following :
3x GPUs with a single 8 pin connector
2x GPUs with an 8 Pin and 6 pin connector
4x single slot GPUs with a single 6 pin connector (2 of the lower PCIe slots do not work for high power GPUs.)
Or any combination that uses the available slots and connectors. (2 dual slot and 2 single slot... or... 3 dual slot)

The ideal slot for a single dual slot GPU would be the bottom PCIe slot as it only blocks a legacy PCI port and outputs the full 75w.

The ideal slot for a single dual slot GPU would be the bottom PCIe slot as it only blocks a legacy PCI port and outputs the full 75w.

I think I understand this. You're saying to put the 2-wide (or even wider!) graphics card in the PCI-E 3.0 x16 CPU 1 slot 4 (conveniently labeled "2" in the diagram below) because it then only blocks the older PCI-E CPU 1 slot 5 (again, labeled confusingly as "1" below). 

If so, this would allow you to put at Thunderbolt 3.0 card in CPU 1 slot 3 (labeled "3", hooray!) as this is the only slot such AICs apparently work in.  BTW the AIC card needs the sideband cable which plugs into the mobo (number "23" below I think).  Anyway, this would allow one to put an nvme PCI-E adapter in CPU 1 slot 2 ("4" below).  One could put another graphics card in the upper CPU 2 slots ("12") or a wifi/bluetooth card. 

BTW, does anybody see a benefit to "load balancing", that is, putting one's nvme adapter card in a CPU 2 slot, since presumably there is a lot of traffic on the CPU 1 PCI-E bus with the graphics card there?)

Just make sure to use the actual Dell thunderbolt card and cable designed for the Precision T7910.  Other bands may or may not work.

And yes the bottom PCIe slot will work for your GPU up to 2 slots wide.

Ok, I'm not going to do any of this, but thought my experience might be useful to others trying to put a more modern and powerful graphics card into a t7910, especially if you want to add Thunderbolt 3 for example.

It's been pointed out that there are two flavors of these graphics cards.  One flavor has transverse air flow, perpendicular to the board.  These are the boards where you see 2 or 3 fans on the board, with the sides open for air flow.  The heat dumps into the case, but if your case is wide open this probably isn't an issue. The other flavor uses a single blower and has axial air flow, exiting out the back edge of the card, to atmosphere. This latter flavor (example: Asus Turbo-RTX2080Ti ) often is thinner.  That is, 2 slots wide vs the transverse style which might be 2.7 or 3 slots wide.  The downside of axial style blower powered cards is that the blower is noisy.  For a 2080 Ti transverse vs blower the difference is signficant, about 5 dBa. So the transverse is 37-40 dBa (normal-full load), and 40-45 dBa for the turbo.    Also, I think that the gpu may run hotter in a axial card as the heat transfer surface is smaller.

I have an EVGA 2080 Ti XC Ultra, which is the transverse style.  It's about 2.7 slots wide. In the T7910, the only PCI-E 3.0  x16 slot that this fits in is CPU_1 slot 2 (the blue one).  It is too wide to fit into CPU_1 slot 4, or into the CPU_2 slots.   Fits into slot 2 just fine, but obscures slots 3 and 4.  With this card, I can't access slot 3, which is the only slot where the Dell thunderbolt card can be installed to work.  

So it appears that if I want to have a graphics card in slot 4 and use slot 3 for Thunderbolt, I'd need the skinnier turbo card.  In fact, if you want multiples of modern (2080-3090 versions) cards, you must have the axial ventilation design.  This would allow you to use CPU_1 slots 2 and 4, and CPU_2 slot 2 for three cards.  

Unless a turbo version of the 3090 drops in my lap, I'm sticking with the transverse flow card.  And I'll do without Thunderbolt 3.  Hope these details are useful.

So you have a EVGA 2080 Ti XC Ultra, into the blue slot and it works fine right?
Might go  for this config. 

Is there a particular plug for power to put in it?

Thanks a lot for. Your feedback. 

Yup. The EVGA RTX 2018 Ti XC Ultra is in the T7910 that I'm using to write this.  It fits in the blue slot (slot #2, CPU #1).  The standard cabling, if I'm correct, is as follows.  The Power distribution in the T7910 (as I understand it) includes three 8 pin sockets.  I think the standard cabling to the graphics board uses two of these, the cables are 1) A long cable, 8 pin to 8 pin, usually with a splitter (8 pin to dual 6 pin), and 2) A long cable, 8 pin to dual 6 pin.  So the first card I used in my machine was a GTX 780 Ti.  This had an eight pin, and a six pin power input configuration.  I pulled the splitter off the 8 pin cable, and used that with one 6 pin output.

For cards with dual 8 pin inputs, one could either buy a reverse splitter (dual 6 pin to single 8 pin) or could just buy the dell 8 pin to 8 pin cable.  The former is about 7 bucks, the latter about 14 bucks, both off ebay.  Both approaches work.

The Blue slot is X16 and primary video slot.

Black slot is X4

SLI or Crossfire is not supported.

Hi, sorry for late reply....

i have a 500-800 euros budget range, what would you recommand or go for?

thanks

Given the worldwide shortage of gpu cards and the high demand, I'd go cheap now, with the plan to upgraded in about 6 months to a year.  

A 1080 Ti is going to be a bit more than your budget (about $1000 now).  Three months ago I bought a 2080 Ti for $850.  If you have to have a 3090, I seem them going for 2-3K.  

If I just needed something to do normal graphics on, I'd buy a 780 ti or somesuch for cheap.   The 1080 Ti would be ok for gaming.

Patience will be rewarded. 

Didn't see this 'til now.  Sorry.  Yeah, I have a 2080 Ti XC Ultra in the blue slot (#2).   IIRC the T7910 comes stock with an 8 pin cable and a dual 6 pin cable.  The card uses two 8 pin supplies.   One can use a dual six pin to single 8 pin adapter, or one can just buy another 8 pin Dell power cable that goes from the power distribution panel to the card.  I found one of those on ebay and now am running the thing with two 8 pin cables. Cleaner, no adapters, and sufficient power (DON'T try to run the card off of a single cable with daisy-chained adapters).

This is an old thread, but I wanted to correct an error I wrote above.  The T7910 mobo only has capacity for Thunderbolt 2 via a PCI-E card (which does have to be in a specific slot) and a gpib cable.  Not thunderbolt 3.