Any risers which do PCI Express with more lanes?

Mr P Hucker
Mr P Hucker
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Topic 229050

I use USB based risers to either connect 1 GPU a couple of feet away from a MB, or a quad one (multiplexer) to connect 4 GPUs a couple of feet from the MB.

The first option connects a card using 1 lane at PCI Express v2.  The second option shares that between all 4 GPUs.

Has anyone seen a version which will use more lanes?  It's actually fine on Einstein, but when I do folding the quad version slows the GPUs to 65% speed.

Ribbons are too short and difficult to fit everything in physically.

A quad which gave one lane at v2 to each card would be perfect.  V3 wouldn't help as it's my older machines with only one v2 slot which are holding things up.

The closest I've found is this, which splits 16 lanes into 4 lots of 4 lanes.https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/354287677520 but one of my older machines only has 4 lanes, not 16.

Actually, that says bifurcation support required, which I assume won't be available on older machines....  Ah well. I guess those I linked to would be useful for putting 4 GPUs onto one 16 lane slot on a newer board.  Which would only happen if I had more than about 7 GPUs on the machine.  Maybe one day....

Perhaps I should buy a mining board with 100s of PCI express slots.....

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Mr P Hucker
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Sorted, bought an Esonic B250

Sorted, bought an Esonic B250 BTC Gladiator motherboard (TWELVE PCI express sockets), an i3-6100 4-core CPU, and a 256GB NVME.  Stealing RAM from another machine, found case, cooler, power supply lying in garage.

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Tom M
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Peter, The only risers I

Peter,

The only risers I know about that have more than 1x are all flat ribbon cables. All the USB cable risers I know about are 1x.

I even have a fancy 1 16x to 8 1x pcie to USB card. I think it only registered a 1x connection off the USB ports.

Tom M

A Proud member of the O.F.A.  (Old Farts Association).  Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® (Garrison Keillor)  I want some more patience. RIGHT NOW!

.clair.
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A bit late to the party I am

A bit late to the party I am , to say the Asus B250 mining expert has/had 19 PCIe slots

Though 18 of them are x1 size .

there are some mad things for the coin collectors to play with :-)

Mr P Hucker
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.clair. wrote: A bit late to

.clair. wrote:

A bit late to the party I am , to say the Asus B250 mining expert has/had 19 PCIe slots

Though 18 of them are x1 size .

there are some mad things for the coin collectors to play with :-)

Yes, I just bought a 12 slot one.  Although I'm using one of the slots for an NVME because it only has mini-SATA and SATA connectors.  Far too slow!

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Mr P Hucker
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Tom M wrote: Peter, The

Tom M wrote:

Peter,

The only risers I know about that have more than 1x are all flat ribbon cables. All the USB cable risers I know about are 1x.

I even have a fancy 1 16x to 8 1x pcie to USB card. I think it only registered a 1x connection off the USB ports.

Tom M

I'm interested in your "fancy 1 16x to 8 1x pcie to USB card".  Can you give me a model name or link?  Do you mean each of the GPUs you connect to the end of those USBs get a single lane of the MB's PCI-E to themselves?  My 4 way adapters share one lane to all 4 cards, so they get not much bandwidth each.  A MB would allow for seperating lanes in the way I think yours does, as long as it supports "bifurcation" - allowing more than one device to share a slot, some lanes each.  You can get quad NVME cards which do that, it simply connects each NVME to 4 of the 16 lanes.

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Tom M
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Peter, They don't sell

Peter,

They don't sell them anymore.

They came out of China. Were a brief splash and then gone.

They use they same chip that allows your motherboard that many slots.

I hope you got a new MB. I had endless trouble trying to make used ones work.

Tom M

A Proud member of the O.F.A.  (Old Farts Association).  Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® (Garrison Keillor)  I want some more patience. RIGHT NOW!

Mr P Hucker
Mr P Hucker
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Tom M wrote:Peter,They

Tom M wrote:

Peter,

They don't sell them anymore.

I don't suppose you want to find yours a good home?

Tom M wrote:

They came out of China. Were a brief splash and then gone.

They use they same chip that allows your motherboard that many slots.

I didn't think that was anything special.  My normal motherboard can send 4,4,4,4 or 8,8 or 16 lanes to some sockets.

Tom M wrote:

I hope you got a new MB. I had endless trouble trying to make used ones work.

Tom M

It's used.  I had three options.  The other two were wait an extra fortnight to get one from China, or pay an extra £10.

Why would a used one be no good?  Motherboards usually last for over a decade.

P.S. if you edit your duplicate posts to two space characters and nothing else, they will self delete.  The twit who calls himself a programmer who wrote the Boinc forum code forgot the most basic thing, a delete button.

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Tom M
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Peter Hucker wrote: P.S. if

Peter Hucker wrote:

P.S. if you edit your duplicate posts to two space characters and nothing else, they will self delete.  The twit who calls himself a programmer who wrote the Boinc forum code forgot the most basic thing, a delete button.

Just tried that.  It complained so I just changed it to my standard and am asking the moderator to hide it.

Tom M

A Proud member of the O.F.A.  (Old Farts Association).  Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® (Garrison Keillor)  I want some more patience. RIGHT NOW!

Tom M
Tom M
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Peter Hucker wrote: Tom M

Peter Hucker wrote:

Tom M wrote:

Peter,

They don't sell them anymore.

I don't suppose you want to find yours a good home?

Peter,

I would have to test it to make sure it is working at least for single GPU cards.  I managed to cause one of the those cards to short out.  And I don't remember if it was this one or not.

Then I have to figure out overseas shipping via eBay. 

Tom M

A Proud member of the O.F.A.  (Old Farts Association).  Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® (Garrison Keillor)  I want some more patience. RIGHT NOW!

Tom M
Tom M
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Peter Hucker wrote: Tom M

Peter Hucker wrote:

Tom M wrote:

Tom M wrote:

I hope you got a new MB. I had endless trouble trying to make used ones work.

Why would a used one be no good?  Motherboards usually last for over a decade.

I am not saying "a used one" (MB) will be no good.  I am saying I should have bounced a lot more of them back as "not working" than I did.

Many of those type of MB's have LED's next to each socket that report on connectivity/is working.  The last MB of that type I had would regularly show unplugged into pcie/usb sockets "connected" (lite up).  And yes a lot of the sockets simply didn't work, lite up or not.

For the kind of Boinc stuff I wanted to process I limited myself to the 2nd Gen Lga 1151 socket MB's.  They allowed me to run 8c/16t cpus which meant it was more likely I could run my Boinc processing at full speed when I was running a lot of gpus.

Way back in the Seti@Home days another participant named tBar demonstrated you couldn't get full speed GPU processing on the petri optimized GPU app with an 4c/8t CPU on the first gen lga 1151 MB's.  With a lot of gpus.

Tom M

 

 

A Proud member of the O.F.A.  (Old Farts Association).  Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® (Garrison Keillor)  I want some more patience. RIGHT NOW!

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