UCS C240 M3 GPU Card Choice

[Koopa]

Good day all, 

I wanted to get everyone's take on which card would be best suitable for my Cisco UCS C240 M3, with 2 x E5-2600 CPUs and 64gb Ram and filled all 22 bays with a combo of 900gb and 1.2tb 2.5" SAS drives.

My main goal for the server is to be used as my NVR for my CCTV (wanting to utilise object detection via BlueIris) and also as a Plex server. 

I'm thinking for the intensive NVR stuff that I'm going to need a gpu card for this work (others have used the Google Coral cards/usb sticks in other NAS setups) and I wanted to know which of the K40 or the K2 cards would be more appropriate?

Also where are we getting power from inside the server to run the card? I'm not 100% where I should be getting power from within inside the server (I'm also trying to run a couple of SATA SSD drives from a PCIe card such I'll need to source power for said drives) 

I've tried looking into the main differences for each card but I can't really land my finger on which card to run with. 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers, 

Brad

[Kirk J]

Greetings.

https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/servers-unified-computing/ucs-c-series-rack-servers/c240m3-sff-specsheet.pdf

Page 43 lists some of the GPU power cable kits you would probably need.  Hopefully you can find some still available

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/c/hw/C240/install/C240/replace.html#34646https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/c/hw/C240/install/C240/replace.html#35288

The drives in these servers get power from the hotplug backplane, so you wont find your common sata power leads coming off the PSUs like in home PCs

Kirk...

[Koopa]

Ahh yep - I did spend a bit of time in the docs, but must have missed the power cable section - thanks for pointing that out!

Do you have any recommendations which card is the more appropriate card to purchase? I'm leaning towards the K40 at this stage, but would like to see what other's think before I make the purchase.

So just on the Sata HDD thing, I've been looking into a PCIe onboard Sata card (such as this PCIe Sata SSD Controller Card https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B07SJSR4C1/?coliid=I2UKEP8AA02O28&colid=W4VGKD82K9CW&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it) as it's saying that no sata power required. From what I've read in the past I may have to enable this PCIe lane within the CIMC bios, and also I may experience increase in fan speeds due to the server not recognising any temp data from the card.

Do you know if I'll be able to boot from this card (I'm reading that there's high possibility that the M3 server may not boot from cards like these), and I guess if it didn't boot from the card I can still use it as a cache.

Thanks again for the asistance