Any idea on a graphics card for my old Z820???

[yoyoj1]

Hello community.
I have an old Z820 (x2 Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2640 v2 @ 2.00GHz and 64GB RAM) with an Nvidia Quadro K5000 card.
I would like to upgrade my graphics card to get better performance than I currently have.

Do you have any ideas for compatible graphics cards?

Thanks for your feedback

have a nice day

[BeemerBiker]

I recommend you stick with an Nvidia graphics board.

According to the spec for the z820 you have one of the two following power supplies

• 850 W 88% Efficient wide-ranging, active Power Factor Correction
• 1125 W 90% Efficient wide-ranging, active Power Factor Correction

Your current video board is here and note that the recommended minimum power supply is 300 watts.

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/quadro-k5000.c565

Scroll the window on the right down and pick an Nvidia board that is rated under 850 watts l(or 1125)

The gtx-1660 Ti is an excellent card and wont break a budget.

The RTX 3xxx series might have problems with older power supplies and are Gen4

 I would stick with a generation 2 or 3 for compatibility with the PCIe bus like an RTX-2060

There board will run hotter than your k5000 so I recommend a turbo or "blower" type that blows the air out the back instead of a card that has 2 or 3 fans and basically keeps the air in the case.

[DGroves]

and just how are we to recommend a card without you providing what use the system is used for ? do you run games or productivity software and which ones? to your credit you did list what card you have and part the systems config  however we also need to know which power supply is installed, the  stock 850 watt or the 1250 watt

all i can say is that a 3090/4090 card (or the quadro equivalent) is overkill as these specific models are able to outstrip the z820's ability to provide data fast fast as these cards want to request it  the 3070/4070 series are the best fit in general if you have the 1250 watt supply

[Brian1965]

Hi Yoyoj1,

I would strongly recommend upgrading your CPU's first before splashing out on an expensive GPU card. Your current E5-2640 v2 CPU's are seriously limiting your system performance. The E5-2640 v2 CPU only supports 1600MHz RAM, has a base frequency of 2.0Ghz, a boost frequency of 2.5GHz, and has 20MB onboard cache. I've just had a look on ebay and you could buy 2x E5-2667 v2 CPU's for less than £70. By comparison, the E5-2667 v2 CPU supports 1866MHz RAM, has a base frequency of 3.3Ghz, a boost frequency of 4.0GHz, and has 25MB onboard cache. Both CPU models are 8-core.

Please remember that your computer can only be as fast as your slowest component, (e.g. RAM, CPU, GPU or HDD/SSD), so there is no point on fitting a high end GPU if your CPU(s) is struggling to keep up. Upgrading your CPU's will significantly improve your current K5000 GPU performance.

Also, as D Grooves rightly points out, it's difficult to recommend a GPU unless you specify what your primary use of the card will be? e.g. gaming, CAD, photography, rendering, etc. Do you have an upgrade budget in mind?