Dell PowerEdge 6650

IO Technology

PCI/PCI-X Expansion Slots

The PowerEdge 6650 provides 8 slots for PCI-X/PCI expansion cards. PCI-X is an extension of the widely accepted PCI standard for data transfer between CPUs and I/O peripherals and is becoming widely used by manufacturers for speeding the flow of data within servers, storage area networks and network switches. Backwards compatible with the high performance PCI local bus specification, PCI-X offers an immediate solution to the increased I/O requirements for high-bandwidth applications such as Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel, Ultra3 SCSI and high-performance graphics. PCI-X supports 32-bit and 64-bit operations at frequencies up to 100Mhz, allowing data throughput up to 800MB/s.

The benefit of having peer PCI buses combined with 64-bit technology is that high load, high performance traffic can be separated from lower performing traffic on the PCI bus. This leads to increased system performance since the higher speed traffic is allocated to the higher speed PCI bus

The PowerEdge 6650 supports one 32-bit/33Mhz slot on the primary (compatibility) PCI bus (bus 0). This slot should be used with a DRAC III card in order to snoop the PCI video data.

The PowerEdge 6650 supports 7 64-bit/100Mhz slots on peer PCI-X buses 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. There are two slots per bus on bus 2 and 3 and one slot each on bus 4, 5, and 6. These slots accept PCI cards designed for 66Mhz or 33Mhz and will operate in PCI mode at the lowest common frequency for that bus. PCI-X cards may co-exist with PCI cards on a bus and will operate in PCI mode. The slots also will operate in PCI-X mode if populated exclusively by PCI-X cards. 133 MHz PCI-X adapters will operate at 100 MHz in these slots. 66 MHz PCI-X adapters present will bring the clock speed down to 66Mhz.

All PCI-X slots are 3V-signaling environment compatible and will accept either 3V PCI and PCI-X cards or Universal PCI cards. The 32-bit/33Mhz PCI slot is a 5V-signaling environment and will accept either 5V PCI or Universal PCI cards. No ISA slots are provided on the PowerEdge 6600 and PowerEdge 6650 system.

IO Tray

PCI-X

PCI eXtended (PCI-X or PCIx) is the next generation local I/O standard that provides high bandwidth, low latency, dedicated hardware interfaces between internal chips and peripheral cards. With 64-bit/133MHz architecture PCI-X provides total I/O bandwidth up to 1GB/s at its peak. This is 8 times more bandwidth than the 32-bit/33MHz implementation that allows for only 133MB/s peak bandwidth and 2 times more bandwidth than the 64-bit/66MHz I/O architecture.

The PowerEdge 6650 provides 7 hot-plug 64-bit/100MHz PCI-X slots each capable of a 800MB/s peak bandwidth.

• Performance
  • Burst transfer rates up to 800MB/s
  • Split transactions and zero wait state for Read completions improve the bus efficiency (allows devices to make a request, and then releases the bus for use by other peripherals until the responding device is ready with the data requested. Ensures that no bus time is wasted, even if the responding device is forced to stall and restart transmission)
  • Standard block size movements with 128-byte boundaries prevent any single process from monopolizing the bus with a single large transfer.
• Investment protection and seamless transition from PCI to PCI-X
  • Fully interoperable and easy design migration with conventional PCI (PCI-X systems can accept standard PCI cards and PCI-X cards can work in current PCI systems)
  • No OS or driver changes required (only for the hot-plug system driver if needed)
  • PCI-X has a huge foundation of infrastructure to build on and it also integrates well with distributed I/O standards like InfiniBand
  • Low cost

More information about PCI-X including the specifications can be found:

Expansion-Card Installation Guidelines

• If you are installing a remote access card, it must be installed in slot 1. Slot 1 operates at 33 MHz.
• RAID controller cards for internal drives must be installed in expansion slots 2 or 3.
• You can install expansion cards of different operating speeds on the same bus; however, all cards on the same bus will operate at the speed of the slowest card on that bus. For example, if one card on the bus has an operating speed of 66 MHz and the other card has an operating speed of 100 MHz, the bus will operate only at 66 MHz.
• To optimize performance, install only one expansion card on a single PCI bus. Otherwise, install only cards of the same operating speed on the same PCI bus.
• If you are replacing an expansion card with a card of a slower operating speed, you must power down the system to install the replacement card.
• If the expansion card you are installing is of a slower operating speed than the cards already installed on the same PCI bus, you must power down all expansion slots on that bus. This action ensures that all expansion cards on that bus power up at the same operating speed. Otherwise, you can install the expansion card in an expansion slot that is alone on a PCI bus or on a PCI bus with cards of the same or slower operating speeds.
• Certain operating systems support only "hot-replace," in which a hot-pluggable expansion card is replaced with its exact equivalent, using the same PCI resources.
• If you are hot-plugging a NIC expansion card, you must either hot-plug the NIC card in an expansion slot that is alone on a PCI bus or on a PCI bus with no card other than another NIC.
• If you have trouble hot-plugging a particular expansion card, turn off your system before installing the card. If the problem persists, obtain technical assistance.