I have an HP Z640 workstation that I have pressed into service as a proxmox host. I am not doing GPU pass through and would love to be able to run this without the included Nvidia Quadro card that it came with, just to lower the idle power draw and free up a PCIe slot. Unfortunately, the bios won’t post when the GPU is removed. The system gives an error beep, displays the red LED power button (an error message) and then shuts down. If I re-install the GPU all returns to normal. Is there a hack or a workaround to enable this machine to run headless?
I’m guessing that this has a Xeon processor with no GPU. If you aren’t finding a setting in the BIOS that allows you to boot without GPU, then your best bet might be to find a really cheap graphics card that draws less power. From what little info I found, it looks like you have a PCI slot, and there are a lot of VGA cards for PCI for under $20. Not sure if it would work, but might be worth a try. Also a bunch of PCI-X cards but I doubt you have that slot, those kind of went away a long time ago.
I thought there were some cheap VGA PCIe cards, but I’m not finding them.
This link might help, or lead to an endless chasing of rabbits down holes https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Desktops-Archive-Read-Only/I-want-to-run-a-Z800-workstation-without-a-graphics-card/td-p/5074576
Seems you need some kind of Bios setup tool because you can’t run the regular visual BIOS without a graphics card. Makes sense I guess.
Yes, I am running a xeon E5 2690v3 with an Nvidia quadro 600 video card. As configured (3 SSD drives, 2 NVMe drives, 64 gb of ram) my idle power consumption is 58 watts. I think I could drop another 10 or 15 if I didn’t need to run the quadro.
Thanks for that Greg