First of all I'm only looking for info and not looking to act at this time.
I've worked in some part of the computer/data field continuously since I first started building legal Mac clones for Motorola back in 1996. There were stretches of time when I pretty much knew all the trivia about hardware, but lately I've focused on other areas and I'm getting a bit rusty.
There was an article on Slashdot about GPU prices falling. I of course being half scavenger and full on bargain hunter decided to take a look to see if there were any killer deals on eBay. I stumbled across this card: NVIDIA Tesla 6GB PCI-E Graphic Card.
I'm still a bit old school since I've been focusing on sys-admin instead of hardware, then shifting to network hardware over the past, I don't know, more than a decade? I've built a few systems during that time, but I know there's stuff going on in the ways buses and cards talk to each other that weren't true when I did hardware seriously, there has to be for stuff like Thunderbolt to work properly.
That particular card doesn't have any ports on it to plug a monitor in. I know it's an HP server card, so it's bound to be a bit weird anyways, but I'm curious.
Is that card built specifically for stuff like coin mining? Or is it supposed to output video to the bus for use with the on-board ports? I know graphics cards are starting to do some cool stuff these days but I haven't fully wrapped my head around the ins and outs. I know my old roommate built an AMD system and added a Radeon card to it, the card added the on-motherboard graphics RAM to itself automatically and increased his video RAM. I built and SLI system using a bridge on an AMD Windows 7 machine and it reported itself working, when I upgraded the exact hardware to Windows 10 it didn't work and I looked up all the info I could, turns out the motherboard supports Crossfire but not SLI. ???? It worked with 7......
Would that card work on a more or less generic motherboard? If so does the board have to support SLI if I want to use it? If it's just too HP-ified to be of use to anything but an HP server I understand that as well. I've just got gears turning and I'm looking for answers.
Also, does anyone have basically a newbie overview link for how modern video works? I'm old school, I remember plugging in a video card, running a jumper out to a graphics accelerator, and maybe running a jumper out to an MPEG decoder. In fact my laptop sort of does something along those lines using Intel video most of the time but kicking in an nVida Quadro when needed.