Hi, I’m looking at my options for a 45 Drives server. I’m looking at getting a PNY RTX Pro 6000 GPU. It’s a 12” long dual slot card. This is for an AI/ML server I’m building. I know the GPU won’t fit into the HL15, and I only need 15 drives as this won’t be a storage server. I was wondering what my options were. I really appreciate any help you can provide and thank you in advance.
The only 45HL chassis that will officially support a GPU greater than about 10.5" long (including end power connector if it has that) is the new Beast.
If you’re not looking for storage, then, to be honest, that is eliminating one of the main reasons you would select a 45HL chassis over other products. There are many other chassis from other vendors–desktop and rackmount–that will take large GPUs.
Unfortunately at the moment 45HL doesn’t offer an official version of the HL15 that trades some of the drive bays for longer PCIE cards.
Ir may be possible to unofficially remove the metal part of the drive cage on an HL15 so that the GPU would extend over part of the backplane, but you would lose some of the drive bays and would need to come up with your own solution for holding the drives in place with some sort of spacers or partial cage of your own design. You would also either lose the mid-case fans, or need to also make a partial bracket for those. You’d probably want to add some baffling so that air flows efficiently through the case for the CPU and PCIe areas, and doesn’t just get all mixed up.
Here is a video of on of the Youtubers who tried to do something like this. I don’t know if there is an update on how it worked out;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lXSdg-8evA
If you have business funding, I think the 45Drives Proxinator allows you to run server type (passively cooled) GPUs.