Is there any problem with putting the systems GPU in the CPU 2 slots, so CPU 1 is free for a nvme raid card? I rather a good guess before I muck about moving cards.
Theoretically yes, but why? Do you have two GPU cards? There are 2 PCIe x16 rider slots (and two x4 wired), those CPU-bound two slots are Gen3 PCIe then with single x16 PCIe dedicated RAID card (you can't combine this RAID array with other storage devices on this machine) for NVMe drives in say RAID-0 mode you can get up to 12 GB/s storage speed. But it really depends .. as not every card will work in T7910 and there were complaints about issues with UEFI mode (discussed on this forum previously). If you have a single card - may be try to leave it in a blue slot and install RAID into bottom x16 PCIe slot, it's Gen3 too? (two others are wired as x4 PCIe) P.S. It's not a drug but something opposite.
There should not be any problem to move your GPU to CPU 2 slot. But if you have a dual slot GPU, you will lose 2 x16 lane slots which would be more valuable to use with 2x NVMe raid cards.
IMHO only single x16 PCIe slot would be lost with DualSlot GPU move since another from CPU0 will be freed (as well as another with x4 electrical wiring but fair point since you can't use NVMe RAID card there, as there's no point of RAID on single storage device).
On a similar note - sadly but it looks like nobody have released commercially available x32 PCIe lanes NVMe RAID cards (which on Gen3 would put storage speeds close to 28GB/s, without talking about RAM-drives, it's more about non-volatile), e.g. 2x16 slots via extra flexi-cable. x32 standard does exists but hardly used in mass production, Gen13 CPUs do have x32 {2x16} PCIe lanes of Gen5 + x4 Gen4 but most stuff I see with servers - is just using regular or weird connectors to split everything into standard x16 slots like below.
P.S. With some DIY effort and mechanical skill there are still ways to keep so called "Blocked/Obscured" slots employed for productive work using various flexible extenders, for instance like the one (of many kinds) below:
With a scalability doubts abouts those solutions of course, but in rare cases when there are no other ways every acceptable alternative seems justified.
Well, I have a single GT 1050 Ti as my primary display on the 2nd CPU, and a USB 3 card in CPU1 in my bottom most PCIe slot freeing up 3 contiguous slots.
The T7910 supports bifurcation natively. You can add NVMe adapter such as Asus Hyper V.2 to each of the x16 slot. It will allow to add up to 4 NVMe drives on each adapter. That is a lot of fast storage.
JOcean
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Posted December 25th, 2022 09:00
Are you sure about that model number as I cannot seem to find that in the support pages?
I am not a Dell employee...I am forum volunteer
Serious work on an E5430 and constantly building and working on an i5-6500 Desktop