Pure luck Quadro RTX 5000 fit

Hardware
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This week I’m building a 2nd and 3rd HL15 Homelab system. It’s a bit of an insane build putting a 64-Core AMD Epyc in each as well as a Quadro RTX 5000.

The primary goal is to use these as cloud application development machines that specialize in image processing. Running S3 compatible object storage locally was a must due to latency of network access to S3 itself, it made more sense to keep the data locally.

However I noticed after ordering the GPU that I didn’t carefully check the GPU size limitations for length. A day before the GPUs arrived I was in a bit of a panic. The Quadro RTX 5000 is 10.5” in length, and that is before you attach the rear PCI-E 8pin and 6pin power connectors. This on paper wasn’t going to work.

Well luck would have it there’s a gap between the fans. It turns out you can fit a Quadro RTX 5000 in the first PCI slots of the case. The power connectors fit back in between the fans. It was a little finicky to install, needing to remove the fan assembly and finesse the install order, but alas it fits perfectly and the power cables even have a nice channel to run in above each fan in the gap.

Thought I’d share for those looking to push the boundary’s of GPU size.

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RTX A4000 is similarly tight and only consumes a single slot (which was the main reason for me to go A4000 instead of A5000+)!

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How did you hook up the GPU power cables? I’m trying to add a 1660 to my machine and my VGA cable doesn’t seem to fit in the CPU/PCIe slots. Do I need a specialized cable that goes VGA->PCIe?

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I’m a “Bare Chassis” owner so I’m not using the OEM PSU, I’ve got MSI Ai1300P units in each of mine and they’ve got PCIe and 12VHPWR outputs for accessories (as need).

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In the future and for anyone else that may stop here. I worked on getting some rough measurements for GPU support in the HL15 in this post. Maybe one day I’ll start working on a list of all the GPUs that are known to fit in the case. Would be cool to have that data handy for future builders.

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PCPartPicker allows you to filter by length. One thing it doesn’t show is whether external power plugs into the top or rear. Without additional filters like chipset there are some 3000 cards that are <= 267mm.

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I have a titan rtx 24g and a quadro rtx 5000. I used a p2200 in my build to save power and the space headache. I added the 2.5 ssd mount to that back so cabling has gotten a bit cluttered.