Z210 video card upgrade

[mschilke]

Will the Z210 workstation be able to support the Nvidia Quadro P1000 video car?. I am looking to upgrade but am not sure if it will work.

[DGroves]

since the P1000 draws less than 75 watts, it does not need a aux power connector on the card.

due to it being powered by the PCI-E bus, you will have no problems installing this card in your z210 and staying in the z210's power supply requirements

http://www.pny.com/nvidia-quadro-p1000

[mschilke]

I guess my quotation applies more to, does the motherboard have a maximum amount of video memory that it will allow a card to have?

[DGroves]

i have absolutly no idea what you are talking about, you will have to decipher the line below into understandable english

"motherboard have a maximum amount of video memory"

[mschilke]

What I mean is, can a motherboard have a slot for a video card to be added, but only take a video card that had less than 1 Gb of VRAM, and not able to use a video card with more VRAM than that?

[DGroves]

sorry, but you still are not describing what you want in terms that i can understand

also do you have the minitower or the Small form factor (SFF) model of the z210?

the minitower uses PCI-E slot video cards and is limited by the amount of power the card draws

the SFF system is the same, but must also use Low Profile pci-e video cards

the PCI-e slots are ver 3, which is downward compatable with revisions 2.0 and 1.0

the video card can have anywhere from 1GB to 8GB of video ram, provided it does not draw more power than the system supply can safely support, this spec is usually listed in the HP quickspecs sheet for your system model (Z210) and sometimes will be diffrent between case configurations, with the SFF models sometimes having lower limits compared to a minitower case

[mschilke]

I'm sorry that I'm not doing a good job of explaining my question. Thank you for your patience. I want to install the P1000 video card with 4Gb vram on it in my Z210 mini tower computer, but my IT guy is telling that the motherboard in the Z210 will only accept a video card of 1 Gb max. This doesn't make sense to me, and I was looking for some verification, one way or the other.

[SDH · Accepted solution]

There are two types if IT guys, in my experience..... the brilliant helpful wonderful type, and the lazy/liars minority.

You have a lazy/liar type blocking you.

Your Z210 is properly called a Z210 CMT for "Convertible Mini-Tower".  Look HERE for v24 of its HP QuickSpecs.  Look on page 8 for the highest end video card that HP specified for this workstation:  High end 3D card, a 2GB Vidia Quadro 4000 card, which from nVidia specs runs at 142W max TDP.  It requires a 6-pin PCIe supplemental power cable.

Guess what?  The standard 400W HP power supply for your workstation includes one of these supplemental PCIe power cables, rated at 12.5A max.... 12.5 A x 12 v = 150W max from the cable.  The PCIe slot provides a max of 75W up to the card also.  So, while you don't want to run up to the max in the specs, there is more than enough power provided to the Quadro 4000 card, if needed.  Your desired card does not need even that.

The 6-pin PCIe supplemental power cable is "V12-G" on the power supply label of the power supply which you can see on eBay by searching for "HP Z210 CMT power supply."  That designation is also listed in your workstation's  HP technical and service manual, which you can download from  HERE.

Video cards have gotten much more powerful over time, while they also have required less power..... the card you want to run officially requires only 47W max TDP.  I never have seen a HP spec on a workstation listing a limitation of how much vRAM it will allow a video card to use.

So, now you know the rest of the story about why I got better at computers..... luckily we now have a bunch of the brilliant helpful wonderful types. 

[mschilke]

Thank you so much. That is what I was expecting to find out. But now I have the information that I need.