Might be easy. Might be hard. Never done it. Here are my notes.
TL;DR
- Managed to get it working after a dozen or so reboots, driver installations, and placement permutation of the original and/or new graphics card
- The only interesting/semi-innovative part of the project was having to pry off a strip of metal from the case’s side panel in order to get the new card to fit.
Long Boring Version
Warning: Ramblings Ahead
I had hoped to go about this process in a slow/careful manner in order to be sure that I knew exactly what the keys to success are in installing a Gigabyte NVIDIA 1060 Geforce GTX into a Dell Precision T5810 running Windows 10.
Nope. Sorry. I did get there eventually, but it was such a convoluted/confusing journey that, frankly, I really am not sure what the “magic” step(s) was/were. So if you’re trying to get help in achieving something similar, then all I can offer are my rambling recollections of a frustrating 1/2-day process.
Background
I wanted to try out photogrammetry (in particular meshroom and alicevision, which require Nvidia GPUs, with these recommended specs) so I posted on r/photogrammetry asking what the lowest-budget hardware is that I would need. Based on the advice I received from a random guy who sounded like he knew what he was talking about, I ended up getting a Dell T5810 from newegg.com. At $290+tax with 12 (logical) Xeon Cores and 64GB of RAM, it seemed like a phenomenal deal. (Tip: I suspect that this was a still-boxed return that newegg.com didn’t want sitting on their shelves so slashed the price; if you’re looking for a good deal, go to newegg.com and just try lots of combinations of specs; if you find a combo with a surprisingly low price — e.g. you add some RAM and price drops with “Only 1 in stock” — then you might be onto an awesome deal!)
Now, to do photogrammetry, I’m told you need a decent GPU, the random guy recommended a GTX 1060. (Note ahead: he also warned that a lot of them are too big for the Dell T5810!)
I’ve never been into gaming, so this was the first time in my life when I’d had to give graphics cards any attention. So this article is very much for the GPU newbies out there.
After observing the ebay market for a week or two, I eventually put in a bid for a Gigabyte Geforce GTX 1060 with 3GB of RAM (the “1060” from hereon). It cost me about $90+shipping. The box arrived in superb condition; the previous owner had evidently kept the box, wrappings, CD and start up pamphlet with the intention to sell it for a future upgrade.
My T5810 came with a basic Nvidia Quadro NVS 295 card. I tested it out by installing Steam and the free trial version of “Shadow of the Tomb Raider” (I literally haven’t played Tomb Raider since the late 90s!), and the poor little Quadro would not even start!
I googled how to replace a graphics card and, of course, there were like a billion articles/discussions on Google, and so I could only peruse the first few I came across, which all conveyed the silly message that there’s nothing to it — just swap the cards, and you’re good to go. Yeah Right.
Hardware Access
So I powered off and opened up the Dell T5810. It was pretty easy to remove the Quadro — no screws to deal with, just a blue plastic clip held it in place. Here it is sitting alongside the 1060.
A quick note on power delivery. The 1060 takes a 6-pin power input. (The Quadro does not; all of its power came via the PCIe slot.) My T5810 Power Supply Unit (PSU) is the default that comes from the manufacturer with the “minimum” 425w delivery. The 1060 says that it requires a PSU with 400w minimum. So part of my experiment is to test if this slender-sounding margin is truly sufficient. The Dell T5810 has two yellow 6-pin cables emanating from the PSU. According to this page, a 6-pin connector provides an additional 75w to the PCIe’s 75w.
Setting the 1060 into place was only a tiny bit trickier. It was twice as wide as the Quadro, so would need to be placed in a different PCIe slot with the extra slot covering removed.
The bigger problem though involved the power connection. First, the 6-pin cable only just reached far enough to get to the top of the 1060 GTX where the power input is situated. Not wanting to put physical stress on the card or connection, I almost considered getting an extension, but decided in the end that it was “only just” long enough.
Second, and much more seriously, the T5810 would not shut on the card because the power cable connector, going into the top of the large 1060 card, was obstructing a ridiculous “crossbar” riveted to the inner side of the removable panel!
So I had to make a decision to either:
- Sell the Gigabyte 1060 model (i.e. resell it on ebay), research what medium-range Nvidia models DO fit the T5810, and then buy that model from ebay/craigslist (at the cost of hours of work, shipping hassle, and weeks of waiting), or
- Pry the riveted crossbar off the panel at risk of damaging the aesthetics of the Dell T5810.
Since the Dell was already second hand, a little bit scuffed up, and not ever intended to be a flagship machine, and since the crossbar had no discernible structural role, I went with the latter. The de-riveting process was fairly easy — I just got a screwdriver and worked it under each rivet till it popped. You could see some minor dents on the outside; but overall I’m very pleased with the outcome.
Software Mayhem
With the case in a closable state I powered on the T5810 having no idea what to expect. I did not install any drivers because (i) I was advised not to on some random google search, and (ii) I was not sure whether drivers would get installed automatically, so wanted to give Windows 10 the opportunity to impress me.
To my (initial) pleasant surprise, the screen came on but, for better or worse, I thought that the image looked ‘crude’, and concluded that the signal was probably not arising from the GPU but from the Motherboard’s fallback signal, even though the signal was being channeled through the 1060 card to the DVI output. (My monitor is too old for an HDMI, but still has a great image.)
So I decided to install the NVIDIA driver. I went to the Nvidia site, downloaded the relevant driver, and was just about to install it when I got a message in a dialog on my Windows 10 machine that said (paraphrased) that I needed to restart for the driver to take effect. Since I had not installed any driver yet, I concluded that Windows 10 must have initiated the driver download automatically, so I restarted with the naïve expectation that it would boot back again with the 1060 fully operational.
Unfortunately, this did not happen. Instead, I got a blank screen. I left it for quite a while (1 hour?) and then killed the power and rebooted.
Now I won’t bore you with the details, but I spent the rest of the day, and much of the next morning, jumping through hoops to get things working. I tried replacing the 1060 with the Quadro; I tried running them both together; I tried the HDMI output, the DVI outputs; I tried installing the driver I downloaded from nvidia.com; I tried installing the software that came with the CD. Sometimes the T5810 would boot; sometimes it wouldn’t. Sometimes it would boot and detect the 1060, sometimes it wouldn’t. I could not discern any rhyme or reason to what the heck was going on. The whole process was incredibly frustrating and opaque. What’s soooo annoying is that I worried it would be confusing and opaque, but neither the “Internet” (presented to me by Google), nor Windows 10, did anything to bring clarity to the situation. I was given no clue as to what was handled automatically, and what was not. I was given no advice to e.g. “give it several hours; it will boot on when ready”. Nothing.
In the end, I got it working without the Quadro. However, I am not willing to say that “all is well that end’s well”, because I really wanted to understand the process, and have not been able to get the clarity that I desired. Windows 10 did nothing to make this process transparent. All it needed was a simple user experience along the lines of “A new graphics card has been detected. Would you like a driver to be installed automatically?”
So if you’re looking for guidance in this area, all I can say is good luck. I still don’t understand why it is not advised to install the driver before installing the hardware. Next time I will.
The good news is that the GPU seems to be performing very well now. It makes light work of Tombraider.
