Dell PowerEdge R210 II graphic card installation

Dale, read the R210 II Hardware Owners Manual and Technical Guidebook for details about your system. Then read then again...

Dispite functinal illiteracy being the norm, after all who wants to read manuals, they are a good resource and unless we make use of them and demand more 'real' techinical info in them, eventually Dell will provide1-2 page sales blurbs/idiot guides and call them tech docs (such is the dumbing down trend these days)...

Well, enough of my document rant and no disrespect intended but do read these above linked docs as they will help you to know your machine :emotion-1:

You should then see that the HOM indicates that within the BIOS Integrated Device Screen, you have the option to disable the embedded video controller if a add-in video card is present.It also highlights that you loose remote access features such as virtual KVM.

This would imply you have a hardware problem if either you can't get into BIOS or the option is not accessable when an add-in video card is installed. So either BIOS does not see an add-in card or another fault exists when the add-in card is installed. Try reseating the raiser card and the add-in graphics card and try again to set "embedded video controller" to "disabled" when booting by pressing F2 to enter your BIOS...

Another possible issue may be that the PCIe slot/raise card/graphics card is faulty so test the PCIe slot using a supported Dell HBA and also test your graphics card in another PC.

Keep in mind that the mechanical x16 PCIe slot on the raiser card is electrically a x8 PCIe slot and as such the graphics card may not be negotiating the x8 lanes correctly... This can sometime cause boot failures on some machines.... See this web page for details about forcing a x16 card to work at x1, x4, x8 speeds using the presence detect logic (PRSNT).

And note that the Technical Guidebook also places some limits on the power consumption of PCIe cards installed witin your system. You are only allowed 25W from the PCIe slot which may be a cooling limitation or a firmware and/or hardware limitation. Who knows, a high power card may cause boot problems if >>25W is sucked from the PCIe slot at boot. As such it's best to follow Dells restrictions and limit yourself to a low power 25W PCIe video card within your R210-II.

Also note that UEFI adda extra complexity when booting an OS on your machine as the graphics card firmware must be UEFI aware for the system to be allowed to boot into a UEFI aware OS. But as i don't use UEFI, i can't give suggestions other than ensure the video card has the latest firmware installed...

Lastly, the R210 has a Matrox G200eW embedded video controller which provides the video function. I believe this device is a PCI based function that is part of the BMC/DRAC. As such, your video does not come from the i3 CPU (even if an i3 CPU variant containing with embedded intel video is accepted within the R210-II).

If you have further issues, it's best to be specific and outline what OS you have, whether the OS uses UEFI/BIOS boot process and what PCIe video card your trying to install. Maybe someone can then offer more concrete advice...

Cheers...

PS: seems the HOM link i added above was lost within the text body when posting and the post edit page has lost it's link icon so i can't re-add it :emotion-6: You can find the HOM at "ftp://ftp.dell.com/Manuals/all-products/esuprt_ser_stor_net/esuprt_poweredge/poweredge-r210-2_Owner's Manual_en-us.pdf"

Other R210-II docs can be found at "http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/product-support/product/poweredge-r210-2/manuals"