Xserve 2008 mezzanine graphics connector

[jamall007]

Hi all, my first post here!

I'd like to first of all say thanks for all the hard work and long hours several posters here obviously put in testing stuff - the endless permutations and combinations of variables must become mind-numbing at times - and also in sharing their methods and results with others. You guys have single-handedly kept OS X competitive and enabled users to extract so much more life out of their machines.

Anyway, I have an early 2008 2.8ghz 8-core Xserve with a GTX 560 Ti running 10.8.2. The 560 Ti is a 2-slot card so I've had to mount it on top of the Xserve's lid and cut a slit for a PCIe extension ribbon to run through. A fibre-channel card is conventionally mounted in the other slot. I removed the Radeon X1300 mezzanine card in order to upgrade to Mountain Lion, and seeing as the X1300 was reported as an 8X PCIe card in System Profiler, I was hoping I could use the empty mezzanine connector to run a cable out for a third PCIe card. I've traced the physical connector to a company called Samtec (Q-Pairs) but can't find any info on the pin assignments Apple used to run PCIe through it. If anyone has any info on the electrical connections, or knows of a way to determine what they are, I'd be very grateful to hear from you.

Thanks

James

[hbrector]

Wow!  I am building an xserve for audio studio and I found this post. You removed the Radeon x1300 and you could load Mountain Lion? I have searched further, but have found nothing to instruct how to remove the x1300 from XSERVE.  Mine is early 2008, Dual 2.8 Xeon Quad Core E5462 (Harpertown) total 8 core, with dual GB NIC. Both PCI slots open, everything pretty much standard.  Needless to say, I have many questions as to the Xserve performance under Mountain Lion:

Does it still handle SAS and SATA drives?  SSD?
Does it open up more choices for video cards?

I personally think that Apple has played down the performance of the Xserve to justify its permanent retirement. If these can be reconfigured to run Mountain Lion with extended storage and graphics they will be great as low cost power houses for custom installations.

Please help!

hbrector

[hbrector]

Hey!  Found a great video!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XHk9szo_zM

Thanks!

[jamall007]

Hi hbrector, I followed these instructions http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1404548&page=5 (refer to MacGolfer's post halfway down) to get Mountain Lion running. It is functionally equivalent to having a Mac Pro 2,1. I haven't tried SAS drives but I have a pair of Intel SSDs in a striped RAID as my boot disk, and have symlinks pointing to the original 1Tb hard drive for most of the folders in my home directory. There are also a few smaller partitions on the 1Tb drive where I have previous versions of OS X, but the only one I ever use is 10.5.8 as there exists a little utility called ZDnet Clock that lets you overclock the the 2.8ghz Xeons to 3.1ghz and boot back into 10.8 while maintaining the higher speed. I'm using 10.8.2 now and accidentally discovered that the original X1300 graphics card is partially supported. I'm not sure if it was the 10.8.2 update which restored its functionality or if it was working right from the start as I never tried it, but it only shows up as having 5mb of VRAM. I have a mini-DVI to HDMI adapter on the way and I plan on using it to drive a television. It will be interesting to see how much of the X1300s capabilities are enabled, and if it affects the system in any way. If you want more detailed instructions and some pics of the hardware modifications I've made email me at my user name @hotmail.com.