What I was aiming to do

I was hoping to find some old legacy PCI Nvidia graphics cards to carry out CUDA1.1 project crunching. This would, hopefully be using a Geforce 9500GT PCI 1GB low riser card.

Unfortunately all traces of probable sales at Amazon/eBay/etc both in the US and UK seem to have evaporated. Indeed, because of cash flow, I missed an opportunity to pick up 2 or 3 PCI only (not PCI Express) Geforce 8400GS, which are slower but also able to do CUDA 1.1 crunching.

Why?

I am running an old dual Prestonia Xeon server, under XP pro 32bit, which has an ATI HD3850 crunching Collatz, Milkyway, etc. But it also has 2 x PCI and 2 X PCI-X expansion slots I would like to drop a couple of 9500GTs in for PrimeGrid.

Research today

Doing Google investigations on PCI to PCI Express adapters/bridges I see that quite a range are available to allow PCI Express cards to be used in legacy PCI MoBos, etc. An example of the adapter can be seen here

So this is now my route of exploration to provide an upgrade path to a Geforce 9500GT 1GB low riser PCI Express card, which can be bought in the UK OK.

How I see it working

I see the purchase of a couple of these half height PCI to PCI Express adapters being plugged in to the 2 PCI expansion slots on the dual Xeon server. I would then plug a Geforce 9500GT low riser PCI-E card in to the top of each adapter, and then load the client, etc, and away we go.

Questions

My intention, originally, was to keep to Nvidia Geforce cards that were compatible with the PCI expansion bus (like a Geforce 9500GT). But, as the adapter allows PCI-E cards to be used, would it still be sensible to use, say, a GTX2xxx series card, or better, instead. Or should I stick with like-for-like?

If a more powerful Geforce card, than a 9500GT, with 32 shaders, is possible, what card should I be looking at?

Is this what you are looking for?
http://dollarshops.eu/product/Sparkle/SP95GT1024D2L-HP/Sparkle%209500GT%201024MB%20DVI%20VGA%20PCI

Maybe they still have one in stock.

Well I solved, expensively, my problem of obtaining 2 x PCI GeForce 9500GT cards. These were ordered about 2 hours ago from Pinnacle Micro, and should be with me in a week or two.

I was looking at this PCI to PCI-E bridge to allow me to use the PCI-E DDR3 9500GT cards available as the old PCI ones seemingly had vanished.

I am happy for this thread to continue discussing whether such a bridge would allow legacy PCs (P3s and P4s) to make use of modern (within reason) GPUs.

Edit, hm, can a PCI-E X16 card fit in a PCI-E X1 slot?

It cannot unless the back of the slot is cut open. Some of the low-end cards have been made on PCI-E x1 boards though (e.g., I have an old 8400 GS card that is PCI-E x1).

Indeed, because of cash flow, I missed an opportunity to pick up 2 or 3 PCI only (not PCI Express) Geforce 8400GS, which are slower but also able to do CUDA 1.1 crunching.

@John: Can you tell me if this works? I also tested it on an old computer with 2 8400GS PCI cards and second with 2 9300GS PCI cards, but only one card is running. Only black Monitor if both cards plugged in. I supposed it must be the "right" motherboard, my computer only contains an old oem board.

Regards Odi

Hmm.. that's an good idea. I will test to serve graphics from another agp card, hopefully i can manage this in bios.

ATI HD3850 in the primary AGP slot. This crunches ATI biased projects like Milkyway, Collatz and DNETC. It cannot run PPSsieve, as it is one series too old.

Yes, i also installed the stream-sdk in different versions. But the error is the same:

Please (re)install OpenCL as described at

Hmm.. that's an good idea. I will test to serve graphics from another agp card, hopefully i can manage this in bios.

Odicin

When I get the dual Xeon, with AGP, running again I am installing the 11.3 ATI driver with APP and AGP Hot Fix.

My OS is Win XP pro SP3 32bit, so I downloaded the AGP hotfix drivers for XP, which I found for 11.6 AGP hotfix here.

Clearly, you may wish to download the AGP hotfix relevant to your OS (assuming it is Win something)

Hmm... Interesting! Same issues at my machine. All AGP Catalyst Drivers from 11.01 up to the latest have the same problems with the resolution. Last "good" driver is 10.12 with Stream SDK 2.2.

But SSE2 could be the problem. The old AMD processor did not support SSE2, only SSE. I must check if there's even a sse2 processor for socket 462 boards available.

Regards Odi
____________

But SSE2 could be the problem. The old AMD processor did not support SSE2, only SSE. I must check if there's even a sse2 processor for socket 462 boards available.

I got a gtx460 to work in a Dell pc using a pci to pci e x16 cable. Cost was $20 but it plugged in just fine and the gpu came right up and ran. Of course I didn't upgrade the power supply so I have to watch that. the other issue I ran into was where to actually sit the card since there's not a place to put it other on the case. But the good news, it works :)

RR

edit: oh and I had to get some extra power cable splitters.