Plugging In A GTX 550 TI Into a

[sinjinwonder]

So, my Dad used to work for a company that gave him a Dell Server to use for hosting, but that is no longer needed. He gave me the server and told me I could use it for gaming, so I'm wondering if it is possible to use a PCIe x16 to x8 converter so that a GTX 550 TI can be plugged in to use with a Dell PowerEdge T300 server?

http://www.dell.com/us/dfb/p/poweredge-t300/pd

 

[suteck]

I'm sure you can plug it in but chances are you're not going to get full use out of the card. The card NEEDS the X16 lane to take advantage of the extra bandwidth it's designed to carry. You're not going to get that using an 8 lane because it's only designed to carry 8 X 250MB = 2GB in each direction, where as the 16 lane, or 16 X 250MB will carry 4GB in each direction. Also, some of those pins are required to carry additional power as well since the X16 cards require more power than the X8 cards so there will be a power loss also. So, You will be able to make the connection with the adapter as you are thinking, (because the adapter is only designed to be able to plug it in with the extra length), but I'm pretty sure you won't get the performance out of it like you actually want to do.

Depending on what cpu it has on the motherboard you might be able to pick up a server board for that cpu that has a pci-e X16 slot or two on it.