ThinkStation P700 - adding a third-party video card: supplementary power connectors?

Question

Hi all,
I have recently purchased a ThinkStation P700 to replace my ageing setup and hopefully serve me for many years to come - It has not yet arrived (that's a different story altogether...).
I have a bit of a dillema regarding the video card I purchased for it. For my work I need CPU, much less so GPU, and especially not a Quadro. So for pure pleasure I added a GeForce GTX Titan Black (yes, I know that Lenovo will will not provide support for stability issues caused by this, etc, etc). I have the card already - here's my problem:
The card uses external power - it has one 8-pin and one 6-pin PCIe power connector on top of the board. With adapters I can get this to three 6-pin or multiple Molex, etc. The motherboard and the PSU in the P700 however, are so well designed and modular, that they almost seem too modular... I looked up the motherboard layout in the manual, and there are only 4-pin (?) connectors on the board, which are supposedly meant to be used with video cards. After a very long session with google it seems that hardly anyone has even heard of 4-pin power connectors for PCIe. Looking at pictures of the chassis available online, everything seems completely self-contained - the PSU slots into the board, and there are no free-hanging cables available whatsoever - am I right? Also pictures showing two full-size video cards installed, do not show power cables at all - maybe they're just cute marketing pics - the Quadros have power ports at the back - I simply can't see power cables in those pics, and the motherboard sockets are free. Obviously I know that the 4-pin, 6-pin and 8-pin are only combinations of 12V rails and ground.
So my questions are:
- are there any 6-pin or 8-pin connectors or Molex available anywhere at all?
- is there a spare part in the form of a 4-pin to 6-pin adapter? Is it perhaps bundled with the P700?
- how are the Lenovo-integrated video cards powered - surely with how thin the PCIE tracks are, they can't be powered only from the board - or can they?
- is this perhaps a joke on me / catch to make sure I only buy the pre-approved cards?
Thank you in advance.
Regards,
owczi
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Answer 1

Hi,
Now THAT was lots of info, and more. Much appreciated.
1. Power connectors - Indeed, Titan (Black) is 8 + 6 - so I'm happy with the info I got from you guys so far.
2. Specs listing dual K6000 - this site (looks like a Lenovo site?): http://thinkstation-specs.com/thinkstation-p700/ - there's a PDF with the same info there. This even says 3 x K6000 in SLI. I mean the board physically has three long slots, and three of those 4-pin ports that according to the manual have something to do with power - but I can't see this working. The psref site says K6000 (one) but the online shop will not let you configure the P700 with one - unless some other options preclude it and that's why I didn't see it.
3. CPU - I have no need for dual CPUs right now so I went for a single E5-1650v3 - I bought the P700 not P500 just so that I have an upgrade option, I may not use the second socket in the end but who knows.
4. Yes, I got the 9364-8i card (plus supercap module) - is this a Lenovo-specific model? Hard to find anything about it online - or is it just new? The blind mate assemblies are good news. So not much different to server-type drive caddies in the end - minus hot swap maybe.
5. Regarding the drives - are the internal (not front - the bottom ones) drive bays also referred to as FLEX bays? Theye are four of them and I intend to use four drives only ( 2x 240G SSD RAID 1 pre-installed + 2 x 4TB RAID 1 mine) - so why do I need to stick two drives into one tray - or is this just if I wanted to maximise the number of drives usable? The 4TB drives are HGST UltraStar 7k4000 - standard, full-thickness 3.5". The SSDs are Lenovo's whatever - the "240G SSD" option - Intel I think, looking at psref.
6. Shipping delays - see, this is the sort of concrete info I was looking for and I'm immensely thankful for this.
The rest is a rant/vent someone from Lenovo should read.
So - in the meantime I started giving Lenovo UK & Ireland some abuse over Twitter (sorry, but well deserved IMO) - name and shame does wonders in the age of social media.
Had I been told something along the lines of "sorry, new product, build issues, we're working on it", I would have (reluctantly) shut up and waited for my turn. I'm an engineer myself, supporting systems where minutes of downtime cost hundreds of thousands, and working with vendors a lot. Delays and issues happen, when an engineer tells me there's an issue and I don't sense B/S, I accept it.
If the product is still wet, don't open it for orders or say it's pre-order. I can see that in the US the P700 is still "coming soon", in the UK it suddenly became available so I ordered it.
However, the process here is broken: Lenovo UKI (is it the same in the US?) uses DigitalRiver as the shop/shipping/support front end. That's all well and good, outsourcing does work in some cases. BUT there's no way to view the estimated shipping dates - only customer support can retrieve them from Lenovo (why can't they just make this info available online - to avoid people over-relying on it?)
The Customer Support cannot tell me anything. The only thing they can do is pull an estimated shipping date out of some magic 8-ball. Two weeks pass since order, I ask CS, they give me Dec 18th shipping date. I call them on the 22nd, on the call with me they tell me it's now magically the 22nd. Come on...
Throughout all this time I got zero notifications about anything happening with the order, as far as the Lenovo site is concerned, it's "in process" since Nov 29. Do you know that when I order a Domino's pizza from round the corner, I get a live animated progress screen from order through assembly, baking, QA and delivery?
Yes, it costs money and yes, businesses pushing more consumer grade disposable **bleep** than anything else, don't care about customer loyalty anymore, but why don't you at least show the high-end customers some respect - why can't you implement a tracking process for custom builds, or at least keep people updated?
I specifically chose the Lenovo P-series because I have no doubt that they are the best on the market. Dell don't offer the same storage options and customisation options. HP are not up there either. Fujitsu Siemens make great machines with straightforward hinged doors and drive bays behind them, but they have a **bleep** distribution model i.e. via specialised resellers only, making it near-impossible for a regular mortal to buy - at least in the UK. So the sad thing here is that I will most likely just wait and you'll still get my money - but if the official channels keep treating me like an idiot, I am very tempted to take my $4k somewhere else.