The motherboard in my old home server died whilst moving house and I have recently acquired a Dell Poweredge 2900 Tower Server.
It is great as a NAS but I would like to add some GPU power so I can do some video encoding.
I know I’ll need a PCIe 8x to 16x adapter to get something reasonable to work with.
Would something like a Quadro K5200 work in this or would I be better off with something older such as a quadro 4000 or is that still too new?
Any advice or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.
So long it has PCIe, those cards are going to be backwards compatible with it. Whether you’ll be able to get their full potential performance depends on the rest of the system. That’s a mid to late 2000s server. What are the other specifications of it?
2 x Dual-Core Xeon 5000.
48GB DDR4 667 MHz RAM.
Dual 930W PSU
Like the other commenters said, the performance per watt isn’t great but if your power is cheap, that won’t matter. You should be able to get quad core Xeon chips on eBay for super cheap (I bought a pair of E5440s for $16 I think). You got plenty of RAM already for a server of that era. Does it have a PCIe power plug inside? You’ll need that for those two GPUs.