Dual XEON rig - Bandwidth limited for PCI-E card? Techies please help!

[Jedtsmith]

Hello,
I have inherited a Dual XEON rig from a friend. It was his server for his business that is no longer around. Specs are 2 XEON 2.8Ghz chips w/ HT, 4GB RAM, 4 SATA HDDs in RAID, Audigy 2 sound card, and unfortunately a crappy built-in Radeon 7000 video card.

I would like to use this rig as a workstation - maybe even a file server too. Problem is, it has weird slots inside. One PCI64 slot that has the RAID card. Only 1 regular PCI slot that has the sound card.
Two PCI-Express slots, but one is 8x and one is 4x. Then it also has funky PCI-X slots that are like 100Mhz or something.

I have seen adapters for the 8x lane PCI-Express to 16x lane PCI-Express, so that the video cards would fit physically into the slot. However, at what point would that be limiting the card? I guess what I'm asking is, IF the 8x to 16x adapter works, what is the best card that I could throw in this rig before I'm bottlenecking the GPU with only 8x PCI-Express?

I hope that makes sense, and thank you for all the help!
Sincerely,
Jed

[Neeyik]

You don't really need an adapter: just cut away the end of the physical slot so that the graphics card fits in. All of the power, ground and signalling pins will be in the right place. As to the whether running a PCIe 1.0 slot in 8x mode will be 'bottleneck', well that depends entirely on what games you'll be playing.

[Meaker]

I read a review at techpowerup.

Even a single GTX 480 looses around 8% going down to pci-express 4x gen 2 (8x gen 1) from 16x gen 2.

[Jedtsmith]

Thanks for the tip about cutting into the socket to make the card fit. I didn't realize you could do that, and all the pinouts would be the same. That's sweet.

I see that the GTX 480 mentioned is that latest top of the line card...I really wasn't thinking anything near that powerful (or that expensive) for this rig. I won't really be gaming. Maybe occasionally, but nothing serious. More of workstation type needs. So if I got say a 8400 GS or Radeon HD4550, something lower end like that, then the 8x PCI-E graphics slot doesn't seem like it will bottleneck anything...

Thanks for the tips!

Jed

[Gordo]

PCI-e is supposed to be compatable each way - just watch there isn't anything on the motherboard that may catch on the end of the card.

[darkblade088]

Cutting the slot sounds dangerous!

[Alvie1981]

Cutting the slot sounds dangerous!

Only if your 12 years old or daft

[idchoppers]

I'm guessing that these are Pentium 4 based Xeons. If you plan on using it for a file server, I would just leave it as is. I wouldn't bother using it as a workstation though. It is pretty slow compared to what is out there now. A cheap dual core AMD or Intel rig would be much faster.

[ViolatorX]

I'm guessing that these are Pentium 4 based Xeons. If you plan on using it for a file server, I would just leave it as is. I wouldn't bother using it as a workstation though. It is pretty slow compared to what is out there now. A cheap dual core AMD or Intel rig would be much faster.

Not to mention would take considerably less power and be quieter to boot.

But i'd agree that cutting into the PCIe slots on a file server that will be run 24/7 is probably not the best idea.