Dell Poweredge t610 into gaming pc

[Assimilator]

are external GPU cages compatible with PCI-E x4 slots?

not something i've dealt with yet

Nope. All eGPU enclosures currently available use Thunderbolt connectors and Thunderbolt requires a chip on the motherboard - it cannot be added via an expansion card.

The only possibility I can see for the OP is to get a PCIe riser and an additional external PSU.

 

[rusststone1]

Im gonna gocwith an external psu. Thats my best bet i think. I already have the riser

 

[lexluthermiester]

Incorrect. A PCIe slot provides up to 25W for "ordinary" cards and up to 75W for "high power" cards, like GPUs, that request it.

For PCIe 8x & 16x slot that is true, not for 4x and below.

 

[rusststone1]

Update on my progress. I have successfully installed the two new cpu 2.80ghz 6 core and they are working. Unfortunately even though I have two 570w psu it's not enough for the 5600 series and I need 870 so performance is downgraded some. I had to put settings to minimum until I get the 870. Due to my mistake I have had to dash my hopes for a decent gpu and had to settle for a nividia 710 2gb ddr3 card. Not the very good but will be able to do some games, but more importantly in the end the server will be better for the video editing that my daughter will be doing than her present laptop will do. I haven't gotten the gpu in the mail yet, but will update when I do. I installed windows 7 ultimate now I am in the process of upgrading to windows 8.1 pro. Not sure it will work but trying and right now setup is at 90% and no problems. You all have been very helpful in this endeavor. Thanks again.

 

[Donokage]

Sorry if necro. I found this looking for a solution for a different problem and fondly recalled having to figure this out on my own so hopefully, this will help someone who needs it. Also, I used to work in tech support so if any of this seems like it should be obvious, I don't know what you know so I am assuming that you don't know anything.

CPU:
You can put consumer grade CPUs in the sockets on this board. Anything that fits an LGA1366 socket will work. For my setup, I stuck with Xeons because I have an overly complex configuration with virtualization and thin clients and all kinds of extra nonsense that is beyond the scope of this topic (they're also stupid cheap). Throw some old i5s, or whatever you have lying around, in there and you should be fine.

RAM:
If you have one CPU don't stick RAM in the slots for the empty socket. It just won't work.
You shouldn't mix RAM types or capacities but if you must, match them in 3s. All 3 gray slots should be identical ram and all 3 black slots should match each other as well.
There is also a limit to how much you can do. I think it's something like 24 gigs of unregistered and 192 gigs of registered ram. I don't know of any home configuration that needs that much memory so if you think you will be affected by this, RTFM to save yourself a headache.

GPU:
There is a setting in the BIOS you will have to change if you want to use a discrete graphics card. While you're in there, you can also disable the onboard graphics with another setting if you want to. If you mess up and need to reset the BIOS settings, the jumpers are on the top of the board, behind the card plugged into PCIe slot 1.
You can stick an x16 card in the x8 slots if you remove the back like suggested in the thread. I used a soldering iron to melt the back out because I had one within arm's reach but I have been known to modify PCI cards instead. The process is arbitrary as long as you are careful not to damage anything. Cover exposed contacts with tape. It is also worth noting that although all of the PCIe slots are x8 in length, some of them do not have 8 rails so check which ones are which. I think the top 2 are x8 and the bottom 2 are actually x4 with x8 connectors.
I have a GTX 1050 TI powered by a 15 pin SATA Male to 6+2 PCIe Female adapter. There are a couple of free 15 pin SATA Female connectors on the rail that plugs into the DVD drive.
I also struggled for far too long with getting my card seated because there are little bits near the clips on the chassis that are intended to align the cards with the openings in the back. I had to bend one because my card takes up 2 slots.

Storage:
This thing has hot-swappable SAS ports in the front. You can plug SATA drives into SAS ports. You cannot plug SAS drives into SATA ports. Consider this when buying storage.
I use 6 SAS drives in Raid 5, a solid state boot drive and a SATA HDD I pulled out of an external drive I found at Goodwill for $5.

Power:
If you leave one PSU unplugged, you will get errors on any server OS you install. Client OSs don't care. I have both plugged in in case one fails because of the aforementioned nonsense that is going on in mine. You can leave one unplugged and switch to it upon failure if you want to extend the life of your backup one.

Network:
USB WiFi dongles work. Depending on your distro, you may have to get creative when installing drivers on a server OS. Consumer ones don't care. I use the integrated NIC and have both ports bonded. This is less system specific and more general advice but, if you are going to aggregate links, it has to be aggregated at both ends. Most consumer routers do not support this feature. Managed switches usually support this and unmanaged ones just don't care.

Audio:
Mine is handled by my graphics card and transmitted over HDMI. My speakers built into my monitor suck so I also have a USB audio adapter that plugs into some desktop speakers. You can use an audio card but, again, drivers for your OS may be a thing.

If there is anything I am missing here, I probably have no idea that it is actually a problem yet, so let me know and I'll get back to you in a year. I got so worked up with this I forgot what my problem was, to begin with.

 

[techtag]

Hey, I wanted to thank everyone here for all the info, a friend and i stumbled into a Poweredge T610 at a scrapyard for 25 bucks and we wondered if we could turn it into a gaming pc. This thread was central to making it work and we did in the end manage to get a 2070 super working great on it (tested with portal with RTX and got 60fps at 1080p on a 4k TV) .
We used a 8x to 16x riser to attach the gpu but it was too short so we cut a slot in the case just above the pcie slots for it to reach out of and sat the gpu on top of the case.
Using an external psu for the gpu bypassed the 25w limit after jumping the motherboard cable on the psu to trick it onto powering on. After that we simply disabled integrated graphics in bios and it automatically defaulted to the 2070S and its been working great since

 

[Chrispy_]

Hey, I wanted to thank everyone here for all the info, a friend and i stumbled into a Poweredge T610 at a scrapyard for 25 bucks and we wondered if we could turn it into a gaming pc. This thread was central to making it work and we did in the end manage to get a 2070 super working great on it (tested with portal with RTX and got 60fps at 1080p on a 4k TV) .
We used a 8x to 16x riser to attach the gpu but it was too short so we cut a slot in the case just above the pcie slots for it to reach out of and sat the gpu on top of the case.
Using an external psu for the gpu bypassed the 25w limit after jumping the motherboard cable on the psu to trick it onto powering on. After that we simply disabled integrated graphics in bios and it automatically defaulted to the 2070S and its been working great since

Good job - always satisfying to bodge hardware that wasn't supposed to fit into an old Dell and stick it to the man!

 

[Mussels]

Hey, I wanted to thank everyone here for all the info, a friend and i stumbled into a Poweredge T610 at a scrapyard for 25 bucks and we wondered if we could turn it into a gaming pc. This thread was central to making it work and we did in the end manage to get a 2070 super working great on it (tested with portal with RTX and got 60fps at 1080p on a 4k TV) .
We used a 8x to 16x riser to attach the gpu but it was too short so we cut a slot in the case just above the pcie slots for it to reach out of and sat the gpu on top of the case.
Using an external psu for the gpu bypassed the 25w limit after jumping the motherboard cable on the psu to trick it onto powering on. After that we simply disabled integrated graphics in bios and it automatically defaulted to the 2070S and its been working great since

Got any pics?

Sounds hilarious, but we all love it when they work (but focus on safety, make sure nothing can short out!)

 

[remixedcat]

Hey, I wanted to thank everyone here for all the info, a friend and i stumbled into a Poweredge T610 at a scrapyard for 25 bucks and we wondered if we could turn it into a gaming pc. This thread was central to making it work and we did in the end manage to get a 2070 super working great on it (tested with portal with RTX and got 60fps at 1080p on a 4k TV) .
We used a 8x to 16x riser to attach the gpu but it was too short so we cut a slot in the case just above the pcie slots for it to reach out of and sat the gpu on top of the case.
Using an external psu for the gpu bypassed the 25w limit after jumping the motherboard cable on the psu to trick it onto powering on. After that we simply disabled integrated graphics in bios and it automatically defaulted to the 2070S and its been working great since

that's awesome! I love unconventional workstation builds and stuff. There's ppl getting dell rackmount servers and using them as workstations as well.

Sorry if necro. I found this looking for a solution for a different problem and fondly recalled having to figure this out on my own so hopefully, this will help someone who needs it. Also, I used to work in tech support so if any of this seems like it should be obvious, I don't know what you know so I am assuming that you don't know anything.

CPU:
You can put consumer grade CPUs in the sockets on this board. Anything that fits an LGA1366 socket will work. For my setup, I stuck with Xeons because I have an overly complex configuration with virtualization and thin clients and all kinds of extra nonsense that is beyond the scope of this topic (they're also stupid cheap). Throw some old i5s, or whatever you have lying around, in there and you should be fine.

RAM:
If you have one CPU don't stick RAM in the slots for the empty socket. It just won't work.
You shouldn't mix RAM types or capacities but if you must, match them in 3s. All 3 gray slots should be identical ram and all 3 black slots should match each other as well.
There is also a limit to how much you can do. I think it's something like 24 gigs of unregistered and 192 gigs of registered ram. I don't know of any home configuration that needs that much memory so if you think you will be affected by this, RTFM to save yourself a headache.

GPU:
There is a setting in the BIOS you will have to change if you want to use a discrete graphics card. While you're in there, you can also disable the onboard graphics with another setting if you want to. If you mess up and need to reset the BIOS settings, the jumpers are on the top of the board, behind the card plugged into PCIe slot 1.
You can stick an x16 card in the x8 slots if you remove the back like suggested in the thread. I used a soldering iron to melt the back out because I had one within arm's reach but I have been known to modify PCI cards instead. The process is arbitrary as long as you are careful not to damage anything. Cover exposed contacts with tape. It is also worth noting that although all of the PCIe slots are x8 in length, some of them do not have 8 rails so check which ones are which. I think the top 2 are x8 and the bottom 2 are actually x4 with x8 connectors.
I have a GTX 1050 TI powered by a 15 pin SATA Male to 6+2 PCIe Female adapter. There are a couple of free 15 pin SATA Female connectors on the rail that plugs into the DVD drive.
I also struggled for far too long with getting my card seated because there are little bits near the clips on the chassis that are intended to align the cards with the openings in the back. I had to bend one because my card takes up 2 slots.

Storage:
This thing has hot-swappable SAS ports in the front. You can plug SATA drives into SAS ports. You cannot plug SAS drives into SATA ports. Consider this when buying storage.
I use 6 SAS drives in Raid 5, a solid state boot drive and a SATA HDD I pulled out of an external drive I found at Goodwill for $5.

Power:
If you leave one PSU unplugged, you will get errors on any server OS you install. Client OSs don't care. I have both plugged in in case one fails because of the aforementioned nonsense that is going on in mine. You can leave one unplugged and switch to it upon failure if you want to extend the life of your backup one.

Network:
USB WiFi dongles work. Depending on your distro, you may have to get creative when installing drivers on a server OS. Consumer ones don't care. I use the integrated NIC and have both ports bonded. This is less system specific and more general advice but, if you are going to aggregate links, it has to be aggregated at both ends. Most consumer routers do not support this feature. Managed switches usually support this and unmanaged ones just don't care.

Audio:
Mine is handled by my graphics card and transmitted over HDMI. My speakers built into my monitor suck so I also have a USB audio adapter that plugs into some desktop speakers. You can use an audio card but, again, drivers for your OS may be a thing.

If there is anything I am missing here, I probably have no idea that it is actually a problem yet, so let me know and I'll get back to you in a year. I got so worked up with this I forgot what my problem was, to begin with.

I have an aggreggation hack that you can get a wired and wireless conenction bonded by turning the wireless into a hyper-v virtual adapter and then going to nic teaming and then team that virual wireless adapter to the wired and there yah go.

 

[budgetbandit]

This is an old thread but I dont think it needs to die this should be Stuck somewhere for thorough documention as these are getting easier to come by and plenty cheap and they are still powerhouses even by todays standard this one is running windows 11 up to date and except for boot times and transfer speads there is no notcable differnece between using this and my 12th gen i7 upstairs for what I do with computers.
I too picked up my Poweredge T610 awhile back for $30 and am looking to max it out without chopping it all to hell.
I was not aware the x8 slots only outputs 25 watts which is weird because before I even began researching into this the first thing I ever did to it day one was take my dremel to the 3rd x8 slot and cut the rear out and installed my MSI branded GTX 1650 and a old 2.5 laptop HDD with windows 10 and it came to life and I even did a couple hours of gaming on it and didnt notice any frame rate drops or any other problems granted I dont think I was playing any titles newer than 2022 releases but it wasnt until earlier this evening when I pulled it back out to fool around with it and I installed an older MSI branded ATI Radeon HD 5450 that I ran into problems and had to do a bit of researching which brought me here to learn I needed to disable the Video in Bios which did get it working with this card as im writing this to you and with that I can say without a doubt that the GTX 1650 did in fact work properly with the video not disabled in Bios with me having to change it for this card is living proof vs my recollection as I have never jumped this board.
So are we sure theres only 25 watts available?
Ive been up all night today is my birthday ill have to pull the GTX 1650 out of my daily rig and reinstall and run some benchmarks and see what kind of wattage its pulling to confirm.

 

[Timpe]

Using an external psu for the gpu bypassed the 25w limit after jumping the motherboard cable on the psu to trick it onto powering on

Anyone got more info on what techtag did here? What cable did he jump on the motherboard to trick the external PSU into powering on? I suppose I'd need something like this: https://www.amazon.com/XT-XINTE-Sup...keywords=dual+psu+molex&qid=1615870470&sr=8-3

I'm not planning to game on my machine, but I would like to have a GPU attached for encoding/decoding tasks and maybe some experimenting with LLMs.

I got a T610 which I've replaced/upgraded all the parts in except for the motherboard, SAS backplane and case. I use it as a homelab server and it's been working pretty great. I've even replaced all the stock Dell fans with Noctua fans (even in the PSUs!) so it's super quiet too:

(don't mind the poor old CPU there, I was in the process of replacing it when I took this pic)


PS: To anyone here who's planning to upgrade their T610, do note the generation of your motherboard, it seems GEN 1 is incompatible with CPUs over 95W. That's why I went for two x5650 CPUs. I found out the hard way that the x5690 will not work

 

[AleXXX666]

those specs dont say if the PSU(s) have any 6/8 pin PCI-E cables, but basically you should be able to slap a GPU in there and away you go.

Servers like that usually have more cores at lower clock speeds, which is not ideal for gaming, but it can be done.

and don't forget to put at least 4 RAM sticks to get 4 channel work, or https://i.dell.com/sites/csdocuments/Shared-Content_data-Sheets_Documents/en/T610-SpecSheet.pdf 1333 Mhz in dual sucks these days.

 

[budgetbandit]

Ok ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls I’m back to present to you my findings that the x8 slots at least the 3rd one down does in fact give a full 75watts as it maxes out a GTX 1650 which is a 75TDP GPU. Proof is in the pudding…. My verdict is the GTX 1650 is a confirmed working simple install with just the back plastic needing ever so slightly modified.
if your wanting to install a card that has external power requirements all you would have to do is lose the DVD drive and run a 15 pin Sata to 6+2 PCIE and call it a day no need to cut holes in the case and use riser cables and shit.

Anyone got more info on what techtag did here? What cable did he jump on the motherboard to trick the external PSU into powering on? I suppose I'd need something like this: https://www.amazon.com/XT-XINTE-Sup...keywords=dual+psu+molex&qid=1615870470&sr=8-3

I'm not planning to game on my machine, but I would like to have a GPU attached for encoding/decoding tasks and maybe some experimenting with LLMs.

I got a T610 which I've replaced/upgraded all the parts in except for the motherboard, SAS backplane and case. I use it as a homelab server and it's been working pretty great. I've even replaced all the stock Dell fans with Noctua fans (even in the PSUs!) so it's super quiet too:

View attachment 343958

(don't mind the poor old CPU there, I was in the process of replacing it when I took this pic)


PS: To anyone here who's planning to upgrade their T610, do note the generation of your motherboard, it seems GEN 1 is incompatible with CPUs over 95W. That's why I went for two x5650 CPUs. I found out the hard way that the x5690 will not work

Did you make a YouTube tutorial on this?

 

[techtag]

Anyone got more info on what techtag did here? What cable did he jump on the motherboard to trick the external PSU into powering on? I suppose I'd need something like this: https://www.amazon.com/XT-XINTE-Sup...keywords=dual+psu+molex&qid=1615870470&sr=8-3

I'm not planning to game on my machine, but I would like to have a GPU attached for encoding/decoding tasks and maybe some experimenting with LLMs.

I got a T610 which I've replaced/upgraded all the parts in except for the motherboard, SAS backplane and case. I use it as a homelab server and it's been working pretty great. I've even replaced all the stock Dell fans with Noctua fans (even in the PSUs!) so it's super quiet too:

View attachment 343958

(don't mind the poor old CPU there, I was in the process of replacing it when I took this pic)


PS: To anyone here who's planning to upgrade their T610, do note the generation of your motherboard, it seems GEN 1 is incompatible with CPUs over 95W. That's why I went for two x5650 CPUs. I found out the hard way that the x5690 will not work

Basically what you see here is to trick the psu into thinking it’s plugged into a mobo so it will send power to the gpu.
We also have to turn the external psu on at the same time the t610 boots.