I would like to add a modern video card to a 2nd hand DL380 G5 so I can have full colour and dual LCD panels in native resolution. Server has onboard ATI ES1000 video chip.
The PCI expansion/riser cage dosen't appear to have extra power points to supply additional current to a PCI video card.
I don't want to play games but do need to display a bit of simulation in openGL. So video card FPS is not important just colour and dual 1680 by 1080 or what ever resolution panels I put on this system.
I simply added an nvidia quatro fx 580 to one of my dl 380 g5 servers.As i had the pcie riser board with full length pci-e x8 slots in it the x16 gpu slots right in but obviously will run at pci-e x8 as that is the limitation of the slot.I see barely any difference between x16 or x8 and this card requires no additional power and seems to give reasonable performance.It also means you are not stuck at the lower resolution of the ati es 1000 onboard graphics.I plan to put an nvidia quadro 2000 in my other dl380 but going with a gpu that requires no extra power connectors is the way to go in a 2u chassis.Also the riser cage takes full size cards.Just google using pci-e x16 cards in pci-e x8 slots.Providing the slot is full length or has an open end or the end cut open to accomodate the larger card it will work fine
The 9500GT is a good card and will work fine but I'd also suggest you check out the GT 210/220 cards - the 210 performs worse than the 9500GT but should be very cheap and is super-low power while the 220 performs better than the 9500GT and STILL runs much cooler and uses much less power. Just wanted you to know.
