Quadro Plex D2 Is the hardware box versatile and adaptable?

As I understand it, a deskside Quadro Plex D2 connects to an x16 PCIe slot on the PC to a cable leading to the external Quadro Plex box.
The box itself contains a power supply, an NF200 switch to share the incoming PCIe connection to two internal PCIe x16 slots. Each slot then holds a Quadro 5800 card.

Is this correct? The NVidia sales summary is technically vague but it’s my guess to what’s happening architecturally.
What’s the PSU inside the box, and does it give 2 6 pin and 2 8 pin connectors?

And my big question… is this hardware repurposable? Specifically, would it be possible to remove the Quadros and insert other PCIe cards like a GTX295 or a S2050?
I could see some nice applications if the box were something that could be adapted as hardware changes.

One specific case I’m thinking of is going on a visit to a remote site, and bringing an external Plex loaded with 2 GTX295s and just hooking it up to a local PC. The alternative of lugging a full PC is annoying. Other uses are to give a boost to a machine that’s already set up but has only too few PCIe slots (and/or not enough PSU)… it’d be nice to have a box that can just be set up and connected quickly to give GPU power.

Telling people they need a new PC to run multi-GPU code always gets a frown… but saying “you can use your current PC and just plug in an external box” is OK. Even when the external box costs more than a whole new PC…

You’re basically correct as to how it operates, but you can’t repurpose it as far as I know because of cooling (I don’t think they’re just normal cards in there in terms of heatsinks and maybe in terms of other stuff too).

Last time I checked NextIO ( http://www.nextio.com/ ) they suggested something similar to what you’re looking.

I found it a bit inappropriate for me since the box and the GPUs inside it will share the single poor x16 lane :)

but for PCI-dependant apps that might be a very good solution…

eyal