How to install a GPU inside of a DELL Poweredge T620 ( on a budget.)

Hello,

Today, for my first post on Medium.com, i will tell you how you can add a GPU in a Dell Poweredge T620 or T630 without using the “GPU enablement kit” or the Power Distribution Board Extension.

Disclaimer:

i would like to tell you that playing with power is dangerous, especially as we are working with power outputs at around 210W@12V, also i want to remind you that you are proceding at your own risk while tempting this mod, i am absolutely not responsible for your actions.
you may fry a GPU, or your server.

How you should normally do it:

This is the way to do it, if you will run this for any kind of real work.

1. Get a GPU enablement kit from dell or a separate vendor.
   the kit should include, the forward fan gantry, 4 fans, 4 GPU cables, and the Power Distribution Board (PDB) Extension.
2. install it using the manual and ressources provided by Dell.

Requirements:

This is absolutely fine for homelab or experimental purposes.

you will need:

1. A Dell T620 or T630
2. A GPU Using PCIe Gen3.0 x16
3. around 30 dollars
4. some patience.

The goal is to exploit another 12v rail located on the already present PDB, which is normally used to power NVMe SSD’s in the front of the chassis.

First of all, you will need to make sure that your PDB has the requierd connections.

to access the PDB, you will need to extract the motherboard from the server, as show in this short clip:

Dell T620 Motherboard extraction.

Once the motherboard is removed, we will need to verify that these two connectors are present and not in use (in my case, i had a cable from previous tests ):

If you have these, you can proceed to the next steps.

The first one is to get your hands on a GPU power cable, which is normaly supposed to come with the GPU enablement kit, these can be found on ebay for aroud 15 dollars, the part referance is : DRXPD or 0DRXPD or 3692K

(Note: the cable is the same regardless of your server model, T620 or T630)

You will also need an extension, as the plug is further into the back of the server.
Make sure that the extension have straight cables or you may run into some obvious issues later.

Once you have the cables in your hands, that’s where you are gonna need some patience, you will need to remove the contacts from the 8 pins molex connector, on the gpu power cable and rearrange them like this:

As you can see, we have:
* 3 12V pins,
* 4 Ground pins
* 1“odd pin”, which is marked with tape here

the final arrangement must be corresponding to this pinout on the board:

on the picture above, the black dots represent the ground pins, the yellow pins represent the 12V pins and the grey one is the odd pin.

In therory, when used, the PDB Extension is bringing the total distance between the GPU plug and the power source around 26CM, as we are not using this PDB extension, you will need the extension you orderd alongside the cable.

you need to check that the extension si not crossed, the cables should be going straight to the other plug.

you may need to remove a small tab between the pins of the plug:

at this point, you should be able to have something that looks a bit like this:

The hard work is now done.

you just have to route the cable properly to your GPU.

And enjoy your newly acquired video processing power !