Can i install a GTX980 on a server mobo?

[masterhashi]

Can i install a GTX980 in a server mobo? the main reason is i want a main display output to a 4K Monitor and Tesla card don't have Display outputs. so i want to know is it possible?
and is it possible to install 4xGTX980 on a Intel® Server Board S2600CWT?

 

[rhysiam]

You can put one in for sure, but are you just needing 4K at a desktop, or is this for gaming? If it's for desktop/workstation then 980 is total overkill, get a much lower tier card with 4K support.

You can put 4 in, but SLI requires (hardware) motherboard support... which I'd be very surprised if you'd find on a server motherboard. Happy for someone to prove me wrong though.

 

[masterhashi]

You can put one in for sure, but are you just needing 4K at a desktop, or is this for gaming? If it's for desktop/workstation then 980 is total overkill, get a much lower tier card with 4K support.

You can put 4 in, but SLI requires (hardware) motherboard support... which I'd be very surprised if you'd find on a server motherboard. Happy for someone to prove me wrong though.

Thanks for your reply. And This is the quote from the support pdf of the server motherboard i mentioned before. -
-"The server board supports up to three full length full height double-width PCIe cards on slot 2,
slot 4, and slot 6, and supports 2-way and 3-way Nvidia* SLI and ATI* CrossFire cards. " - 😀

And also i'll play some games if win 8.1 pro supports up to 36 logical cores. But actually it's not for gaming, me and my pals was doing a some gpu intensive research unfortunately My GTX 970 and i7 4770K couldn't handle it.

so i decided to build a my own cluster. with
Intel® Server Board S2600CWT mobo + 2x Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2699 v3 😀
8 * 8GB DDR4 2133MHz Ram
The gpu i was gonna buy was Tesla but i recently found it doesn't have a display output so i asked for help in this forum.
And the PSU recommended to me was a 1400W one, don't remember the name.
And i don't care about the cost as long as it's under 100K .(no,no i'm not rich . this is from my research budget for hardware)

Sorry for the long reply. if this helps to answer the question here's some more reference from mobo pdf.

"Standard PCIe slots can provide up to 25W power. PCIe slot 2, 4, and 6 can provide up to 75W
power. The higher power requirement needs direct power cables from power supplies.

Note:
1. Both CPU power connectors need to be connected in order for all the PCIe slots to work.
2. While PCIe slot 5 is also an x16 connector, only 3 x16 PCIe slots on the board can support
up to 75W slot power at a time. This is a configuration limitation based on the System
Power budget. When used as riser slot, slot 6 can each provide up to 75W power to the riser.

x16 300W card(max TDP limit)
- 75W from PCIe slot and 225W from PSU direct cable attach: 75W (2x3 conn) +
150W (2x4 conn)"

Sorry about the long reply.but i think this will be helpful for others as well as me who wanted know about it.
And can you please answer the first question after reading the info?

 

[rhysiam]

So there you go... I am happy to be proved wrong! You can install 3 980s AND SLI them, but not four.

The 980s (and all but the absolute entry level GPUs) expect 75W from over PCIe, which only 3 of your slots provide. You *might* get away with running a 980 over one of the other (25W) slots, but you'd be running it out-of-spec which doesn't seem like a good idea to me. This is really well beyond my experience though so I'll defer to others who might be better informed.
You certainly couldn't run the 4th in SLI though, as there's no motherboard support for that.

If you haven't already, it's worth exploring what graphics hardware your research software recommends. Depending on the types of workload and software support, a Titan (or even two TitanZs - which would go in your system), or high end AMD cards will in many cases offer far, far better performance than consumer level GTX cards which Nvidia deliberately hamstring for professional/compute tasks (I'm NOT digging on Nvidia here, they just don't want professionals buying cheaper consumer cards!). Again though, I'll freely admit I don't have a lot of experience in this area, just my thinking that you should find out what hardware is recommended by whatever software package you're using, and expressing my surprise that GTX cards will be the best fit (though they may well be!)

FYI - Win8 pro supports up to 512GB of RAM and two physical processors with (in theory at least), as many phyiscal cores and logical threads as you can fit in them... so your 72 logical cores should be supported.

 

[masterhashi]

So there you go... I am happy to be proved wrong! You can install 3 980s AND SLI them, but not four.

The 980s (and all but the absolute entry level GPUs) expect 75W from over PCIe, which only 3 of your slots provide. You *might* get away with running a 980 over one of the other (25W) slots, but you'd be running it out-of-spec which doesn't seem like a good idea to me. This is really well beyond my experience though so I'll defer to others who might be better informed.
You certainly couldn't run the 4th in SLI though, as there's no motherboard support for that.

If you haven't already, it's worth exploring what graphics hardware your research software recommends. Depending on the types of workload and software support, a Titan (or even two TitanZs - which would go in your system), or high end AMD cards will in many cases offer far, far better performance than consumer level GTX cards which Nvidia deliberately hamstring for professional/compute tasks (I'm NOT digging on Nvidia here, they just don't want professionals buying cheaper consumer cards!). Again though, I'll freely admit I don't have a lot of experience in this area, just my thinking that you should find out what hardware is recommended by whatever software package you're using, and expressing my surprise that GTX cards will be the best fit (though they may well be!)

FYI - Win8 pro supports up to 512GB of RAM and two physical processors with (in theory at least), as many phyiscal cores and logical threads as you can fit in them... so your 72 logical cores should be supported.

Thanks again for the reply and help. i found the perfect gpu for my need it's called "AMD Radeon™ Sky 900" (300W TDP),
and it's supports gpu virtualization and have 2xDisplay outputs (1x Dual-Link DVI, 1x Mini DisplayPort 1.2) and also it's supports upto 4096x2160, 4K resoulution. i'm gonna use 3x Sky 900 on my mobo and use a psu with high W level according to their needs.

 

[rhysiam]

So your research software will use the Sky 900? That's really strange, because it's designed for cloud gaming, not professional/compute/number crunching tasks.

When you say "GPU intensive research"... what software are you using?

 

[masterhashi]

So your research software will use the Sky 900? That's really strange, because it's designed for cloud gaming, not professional/compute/number crunching tasks.

When you say "GPU intensive research"... what software are you using?

Sorry i can't give you any specs about my research right now. but you can suspect it's involved in cloud gaming and 4K video streaming. 😉

 

[rhysiam]

Fair enough, glad you found something that fits the bill. Good luck.

 

[masterhashi]

Fair enough, glad you found something that fits the bill. Good luck.

Thanks