xw8400 specs show dual Quadro FX 3500 support....but how?

[LePaul]

Hello

I have a HP xw8400 Workstation that I recently purchased when it came off-lease.  In many of my serarches here on HP and other resellers, the system lists as being capable of handling two of the nVidia Quadro FX 3500 video cards.  I have one installed now and the documentation seems a bit vague as to where a second card should be installed.

Also, I am running Windows 7 64-bit with 4GB of RAM.  It is running very nicely despite not seeing any "official" support for Windows 7.  Why might that be?

Thanks in advance.  These are really a nicely built system and can be had for an incredible price these days.  I plan to use mine for CAD software.

Paul

http://paulsr2d2.blogspot.com

[Big_Dave]

Paul,

This Technical Reference may be helpful.  The motherboard shows two PCI-E x 16 slots and one is designated for video.  I have seen some workstation models where the second PCI-E slot is only x4 verses the primary slot being x16.

[LePaul]

Thank you for your reply.

I have one card in the Slot 2 (PCI Expess x16) which is what that manual specifies for the video card

It looks like Slot 4 (PCI Express x16 (x4 performance) J31) is where the second would go, which was the hunch I had.

My worry was the power draw of two cards, since in one of the other PDFs I had read indicated caution with high powered cards

Since I found so many sales pamphlets indicating support for two cards, there HAD to be something indicating how two were setup  

[Big_Dave]

The specifications for the xw8400 indicate a 800 watt power supply.

Personally if this were my system, I would consider one big video card.  Quadro has some extremely expensive video cards for professional applications.  For gaming, I would pick a consumer level video card.

Review the ATI and NVIDIA performance specifications. Look at the memory bandwidth specifications and the DirectX level support.

[LePaul]

Two questions....

FX 3500 works great....Im curious if its worth going up a notch there (SolidWorks)

I have the Dual Xeon 3ghz CPUs.  To upgrade to two Quad Core processors would be close to $900, but 8 processors.  Wow.  Worth it?

[Big_Dave]

Your application(s) need to take advantage of all those processors.  Start Task Manager --> resource monitoring and leave Task Manager running.  Then start your application(s) and run them hard for a while and then switch back to Task Manager.   What do you see for processor utilization across the four processors?  What about disk I/O activity when running your applications?