IBM Intellistation Z Pro video cards?

[Marin85]

Hi,

does anyone know how upgradeable the video card (PCIe x16, full lenght, full height) of an Intellistation Z Pro of type 6223 or 9228 is? By upgradeable I mean, are there any BIOS-related limitations (like whitelist or similar) for the video crads, that is, would any card within suitable specs work?

Thanks,
Marin

[blackj]

I know this is an old post, but for the record, I have a 9228-82U that originally had a GeForce FX3500. I decided to try and buy an ATI Radeon HD5570 and it works great.

Might be useful for anyone looking for info on these bad boys. What a great machine this is!

[ThinkRob]

Huh. I never noticed this post.

But I can confirm, as I have two Intellistation Z Pros: no, there are no BIOS whitelists. You can use any video card.

[Gewehr98]

I'm currently running an ATI-AMD Radeon HD6870 in my Z-Pro 9228, no problems.

I am looking to upgrade to a Radeon HD7870 soon, if I do I'll report back here.

[qserenali]

Have you upgraded to HD7870? Does it work?

[victorl25]

I have installed Windows 8 x64 on Intellistation Z Pro 6223, but Windows would not run 64bit driver for the video card. I have tried two different cards (both Nvidia though) and in each case Windows would stop the driver with the following message "Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems. (Code 43)" and load the basic video driver instead. Did anyone get any video card to work on Z Pro with Windows 8 x64?

[Theokretes]

Make sure windows 8 can properly install the 9228's chipset, if it still doesn't work, I'd try server 2012.

IBM never whitelisted anything on the intellistations, they did however disable VT-x which you have to hack with a hex editor to enable manually on the 9228s.

[micrex22]

Have you upgraded to HD7870? Does it work?

I have tried an ASUS R9 270 in these systems and confirmed it works (which is far newer than the HD series). I was quite surprised it worked to be honest.

[mickloaf]

As with the previous poster, apologies for replying to such an old thread but there are a lot of us still running these old girls, I've got two in use myself, and this thread comes very high in the Google rankings.

I can confirm via testing that NVidia's recent GTX960, GTX970 and GTX980 cards all work perfectly in these machines.*¹
*This applies to single cards, I have not attempted SLI.
¹I have only tested PNY brand cards.

As you can confirm for yourself via other articles such as the GTX980 one I link to below, the PCIe 1.1 limitation on PCIex16 only sacrifices 3-5% performance.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVID ... ng/21.html

Both 9228 systems I tested these cards on have 32GB of RAM and SSDs, with one running two Quad Core E5345s @ 2.33GHz and the other machine running two Quad Core X5365s @ 3.0GHz.

Despite their almost ten year vintage, with a good modern GPU these are still very impressive machines.