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We recently purchased a Dell PowerEdge C1100 off lease with the initention of using it for graphics processing. We installed an AMD HD 7000 series GPU in it that runs off of board power and it sends video to the display. That said, the video is very choppy, leading us to belive that the onboard video is doing all the processing and sending it to the card. Is there any way to either disable the VGA on this server or tell the OS to only use the dedicated card.

More info:

  • The server is running REHL 6.4
  • The graphics running the proprietary AMD drivers
  • The video card only works in OS and does not show the BIOS on boot (we know that it's impossible to change this)

Any ideas, guys?

Update

We are now thinking that the GPU is doing the graphics processing, but not working at the full speed of the PCI bus. Which is odd, because it is an x16 slot, but probably optimized to use a RAID card (if that makes any sense).

Is there any way to remedy the choppy graphics on this server?

HopelessN00b
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Eli Gundry
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1 Answers1

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I don't think a PCIe slot can be "optimised for a RAID card" but you definitely can have slots that run at a different speed than other slots.

You can check slot transfer speed as follows:

# lspci | grep VGA  
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: <videocard name here>

# lspci -vvvv -s 01:00.0

Look under Capabilities for LnkCap LnkSta and LnkCtl fields.

Here's my card desiring a PCIe x16 slot, which it is in:

LnkCap: Port #0, Speed 5GT/s, Width x16
LnkSta: Speed 5GT/s, Width x16
LnkCtl2: Target Link Speed: 5GT/s

If you see the LnkCap and LnkSta something slower like 2.5GT/s (PCIe x8) that could indeed be your problem.

You might be able to identify a better slot to use with a combination of lspci -tv and lspci -vvvv.

suprjami
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