x3400 7975 Video Card?

[UnclScott]

Ok, so i'm just about at my wits end here. I have an IBM x3400 7975 and i'd like to add a video card to it and throw on Win8 x64.

Thinking power might be an issue, i removed one CPU, one hdd, the Optical Drive, as well as COM2. I have gone so far as to pull out my old USB Floppy and 1.44 disks to flash and update, from the beginning, the ServeRaid and BIOS.

Please Note: You CANNOT disable On-Board Video in the BIOS. There is Not an option to disable onboard video.
​

Here is my system:
[ul]
[li]1 Power Supply ~ i believe it's 835w[/li]
[li]1 CPU 2 GHz Xeon e5405 ( 4 core )[/li]
[li]16 GB RAM[/li]
[li]Severaid 8k SATA[/li]
[li]2x 15k-rpm 73GB SAS Hdds[/li]
[li]1 HIS Radeon ( ATI/AMD ) HD 5450 Pci-e x1 Video Card installed in slot 2. Drivers are on the Windows 8 Disc[/li]
[li]ATI ES1000 / RN 50, on-board video bios cannot be disabled.[/li]
[li]Keyboard, Mouse, Optical, and Sound are All through the powered USB 2.0 hub built into the monitor[/li]
[li]Monitor Dell w/4 port usb 2.0 ~ connected through DVI[/li]
[/ul]

Slots
[ul]
[li]1 - PCIe x8 (x4) 25w[/li]
[li]2 - PCIe x8 25w[/li]
[li]3 - PCIe x8 25w[/li]
[li]4 - PCI-x 2.0 133mhz x64[/li]
[li]5 - PCI-x 2.0 133mhz x64[/li]
[li]6 - PCI[/li]
[/ul]

As for my BIOS
[ul]
[li]PATA, SATA, COM's, Parallel ports are all disabled.[/li]
[li]RAM is set to Interweave, the onboard Planar Nic, USB, and SAS are enabled; everything else is disabled.[/li]
[li]For the PCI-e slots, only the first 3 get loaded at boot ( i'm pretty sure i can disable slots one and three, but meh... )... i put the video card into slot 1, but the system clearly didn't like it - nic, onboard video, and the external card were all the same irq and it didn't like it i'm guessing... so at slot 2, the card is auto assigned to irq 10 ( nic and video are irq 5, usb 9 ).[/li]
[/ul]
Serveraid 8k
[ul]
[li]Set to SATA, i'd like Raid 0[/li]
[/ul]

Process
[ul]
[li]Format Drives through Severaid, reboot[/li]
[li]Verify[/li]
[li]Init, Verify[/li]
[li]Create RAID 0, Verify, Shutdown after full restart[/li]
[li]Attach Optical Drive to USB and put the Windows Disc In[/li]
[li]Install Windows[/li]
[li]Upon 1st reboot of windows, i get a blank screen[/li]
[/ul]
Since i can post, and have windows go through the boot, enter my key, format, and install, but then the screen blanks out, or i get constant reboots.

I can tell you, if i attach an analog cable between my monitor and the onboard video slot, no matter what, the monitor shows through the video card only. It will switch between DVI and Analog upon reboots w/o issue. Formatting both drives takes 50 minutes, each verify takes 30 Minutes, and Windows is about 20 minutes ~ a 3 hr process Please give me at least a day between trials.

So it's a windows problem right? Am i missing something? Should i change some settings somewhere? Do you need more info? Any thoughts? Should i get a new video card? Is this possible?

 

[UnclScott]

So i got my cpu's in the mail, but don't have the vrm yet so here's a Benchmark from a single e5440 2.83 GHz



The new cpu seems to have increased the video card's performance by 10%, but it's still REALLY SLOW.

On a side note, anyone know what's the fastest and most RAM for this board? I noticed on IBM's site, they only list one, 4 GB x 2 option and PC2 5300 ( DDR2 667 ). Since DDR2 goes up to 800 ( PC2 6400 ), and there are now 16 GB sticks, i'm wondering if anyone knows of faster compatible RAM? Currently i have a bunch of 1 GB and 2 GB modules to get to my 16 GBs, and i'm curious about upgrading. From what i can tell, the board supports 32 GBs max.

Thank you again

 

[UnclScott]

Final Rating. Can't help thinking though, i should of purchased a PCI-e NIC and disabled the legacy PCI bus.



Thanks again for all your help.

 

[UnclScott]

So using an x8 to x16 adapter, running with a molex to 6 pin power adapter, and using a x16 PCI-e nVidia GT 8800 i get this.

][link =

http://www.passmark.com/baselines/V8/display.php?id=11536320004

]

[/url]

Increased 600 on the passmark system scale. This is proof of concept. Note however, there was no DX 11 Test. Now i'm going to check if the NMI was caused by a possible bad video card.