Dell Precision T7910 support for PCI video cards

Question

I’m trying to use a PCI (not PCI Express) video card in slot 5 to drive a display/monitor. The reason I want to go with an older PCI video card in slot 5 (the only PCI slot) is that I want to free up all the PCIe slots for additional cards such as GPUs for machine learning.

I installed a VisionTek 900608 AMD Radeon HD 7350 PCI 512MB DMS59 Graphics Video Card in slot 5 and connected a monitor through a DisplayPort cable. The cable works as I’ve used it successfully with another video card. However, I see no signal to the monitor. I waited five minutes for the Dell logo to appear but nothing but a blank screen. Next, I inserted a PCIe video card in slot 2 and connected to the monitor using the same DisplayPort cable. The Dell logo came up and I entered the bios. Under video settings on the A34 bios (the most recent version), I set the primary boot video device as slot 5. Next, I shut down the machine and reinserted the PCI video card into slot 5. But I still can’t see any video signal on the monitor connected to the slot 5 video card.

Any suggestions for getting the PCI video card to work in slot 5?

atulkc · Accepted Answer

After a lot of online research and trying many possible solutions, I've come to the conclusion that it's not possible to use a legacy PCI graphics card as the primary video card on a Dell T7910 workstation if you must have Secure Boot enabled. The reason is not a defect in the Dell BIOS, but rather the fact that with Secure Boot enabled, you need the graphics card to have UEFI support and, to my knowledge, no legacy PCI graphics card has been updated to add UEFI support. I tinkered with GPU-z, GOPupd, and amdvbflash and "added" UEFI capability to my PCI card as confirmed by GPU-Z. After this, I was able to boot Windows or Ubuntu using this as the primary graphics card. However, within minutes, the machine would completely freeze and had to be restarted. The Dell BIOS still saw this as a PCI Bridge and not a video card, but the OS was able to boot until it crashed/froze. I tried this multiple times with the same result.

You can use any PCI graphics card as the primary video card PROVIDED you enable Legacy Option ROMs and turn off Secure Boot. If you can live with this less secure set up, you can use a legacy PCI graphics card to drive your monitor. Just make sure to set the Primary Video Slot as slot 5 under the BIOS Video settings. Slot 5 is the only legacy PCI slot on this workstation.

atulkc · Answer

Some additional info...

I booted the T7910 with both video cards installed - the legacy PCI video card in slot 5 and a PCIe video card in slot 2. I connect the monitor to the displayPort connector on the PICe video card. I saw the Dell logo and entered F2 to enter the bios. I am posting some relevant screenshots from the bios.

The first picture below shows that the PCI slot is enabled.

Dell BIOS - System Config - 1.jpeg

The next picture shows that slot 5 is to be considered the primary video slot.

Dell BIOS - Video - 1.jpeg

The last picture shows that despite the above settings, the Dell T7910 sees the PCI video card in slot 5 as a PCI bridge, not a VGA compatible video card.

Dell BIOS - System Info - 1.jpeg

How do I make the T7910 see the PCI video card in slot 5 as a video card and use it as the primary display card during boot?

atulkc · Answer

Further related info...With the configuration as described in the 2nd post above (both a PCI video card and a PCIe video card with a monitor connected to the PCIe video card), I booted into Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Here is information on the video cards as seen by Ubuntu. The PCIe card is a NVIDIA Titan-X GPU and the legacy PCI card, as stated above, is a VisionTek 900608 AMD Radeon HD 7350. Clearly, Ubuntu sees the legacy PCI card as a VGA compatible controller. Why doesn't the Dell BIOS see it as such and why does it fail to use it as a primary video card despite the appropriate BIOS settings?To me, this appears to be a defect in the Dell BIOS. Hope there is an easy way to fix this. I'd appreciate any help. $ $ lspci | grep -i amd 0c:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Cedar [Radeon HD 5000/6000/7350/8350 Series] 0c:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Cedar HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 5400/6300/7300 Series] $ $ $ lshw -numeric -C display *-display description: VGA compatible controller product: GM200 [GeForce GTX TITAN X] [10DE:17C2] vendor: NVIDIA Corporation [10DE] physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0 version: a1 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom configuration: driver=nvidia latency=0 resources: irq:185 memory:f2000000-f2ffffff memory:c0000000-cfffffff memory:d0000000-d1ffffff ioport:7000(size=128) memory:f3000000-f307ffff *-display description: VGA compatible controller product: Cedar [Radeon HD 5000/6000/7350/8350 Series] [1002:68F9] vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] [1002] physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:0c:00.0 version: 00 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom configuration: driver=radeon latency=0 resources: irq:184 memory:e0000000-efffffff memory:f3320000-f333ffff ioport:5000(size=256) memory:f3300000-f331ffff $ $

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Dell Precision T7910 support for PCI video cards

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