Dell T7910 Motherboard & Extra Parts
Just got my hands on (2) T7910s. Robbed one for Ram and processor. Running 2 Xeon 4 Core 3.5ghz. Total of 8 cores. 128GB of ram.
Questions? I’d love to install an M2 / NVME drive in it. Any suggestions on best procedure? What is the bare extra motherboard worth? Also have an extra Nvidia Quadra card. What’s it worth?
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NVMe drive can be used but you need to have a 2nd CPU, which you now have. The TOP PCIe slot is the one you need use, but you need to purchase an economical card to hold your M.2 drive. Now understand this, the system is very finicky and not just any M.2 drives will work. Take a look at the article in GreenPC that specifies what PCIe card and M.2 drives work, it is good information.
I would advise holding onto the spare parts you have in your possession, finding or even paying for, those parts if you need them later, will break the bank, if you can even find them then. I have 2 ea. T7910's, and 1 is being converted to a game rig (maybe) or i may sell both of them to fund a dedicated game rig and extra cash in my pocket. They are bringing about $2500 each in the configuration they are in.
Good luck on your quest. Measure 2x, cut 1x, same goes here, DO YOUR RESEARCH before you spend your money.
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Haven't tried it yet but my research has told me on the 58/78 series dells that nvme boot is possible and it has pcie bifurcation which would let you put 4 nvme cards to one pcie 3.0 x16 slot via an adapter card. The old cards they recommend were very expensive because they did the lane switching for motherboards without bifurcation. So if a 7810 could do it I can't imagine that a 7910 can't. I do believe for it to boot it HAS to be a uefi os install with the drive set to ahci. If you leave it at the default raid it will not work. Don't know what the motherboard is worth. Those are too new for me to research ( too expensive yet) and the quadro card need to know which one it is. Could be 15 bucks could be 4 grand.
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I have a T7910 with a 1Tb samsung 970 evo plus (apparently the evo pro is not worth it for my application). There is no M.2 socket of either NVME or SATA flavor on the T7910 mobo. You can by a 14 dollar PCI-E nvme adapter, or the dell ultraspeed quad adapter (for about 100-150 bucks). For a single nvme ssd, there's not much difference I'm told. I removed all other ssds and hdds, installed the adapter with the nvme ssd, and booted with a usb install disk. Install went fine. Then I updated the BIOS (not very hard). Then I installed Dell Command Update (only in Windows) and installed all the latest drivers as per Dell instructions. I then updated my graphics card driver. Then I installed additional SSDs. Works great. The difference between the ultraspeed and the PCI-E adapter (which will be an x4 adapter, btw) is that you could use 4 nvme drives in the ultraspeed adapter.