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  • jrs77 - Friday, July 6, 2018 - link

    I think it's a shame, that all those PCIe cards don't work in the PEG-slot of a mITX-board. It's time to get rid of the GPU-only restriction on those PCIe x16 slots on mITX-boards and open up the PCIe lanes to be used with all sorts of cards like TV-tuners, soundcards or and especially PCIe M.2 riser cards.
  • Zan Lynx - Friday, July 6, 2018 - link

    I have no idea what's limiting your board from using anything in that slot. I had a mITX AMD E350 board with one and it worked fine for an x4 eSATA controller. Try it and see what happens.
  • shelbystripes - Friday, July 6, 2018 - link

    WTF are you talking about dude? Every mITX board I’ve ever used, the PCIe slot is just a PCIe slot. Last one I set up was a Gigabyte board, I used the PCIe slot for a dual Intel GbE card and it worked just fine.
  • jrs77 - Saturday, July 7, 2018 - link

    The last 7 or 8 mITX boards I've owned, from Gigabyte, Asus or ASRock have all not recognized any TV-tuner or soundcard I've tested, but have accepted every GPU.

    All those boards I've had, have a PEG-slot (PCI Express Graphics) and these slots somehow don't work with anything else than a GPU. I can't tell you if this is restricted by the chipset or the BIOS. All I can tell you is what my experiences are for the last 10 years.
  • saratoga4 - Saturday, July 7, 2018 - link

    Probably an issue with whatever boards you're using. The system itself won't care what card goes into what slot. PCIe is PCIe.
  • CheapSushi - Friday, July 6, 2018 - link

    Really wish there were dual and quad nvme adapter options for us with older boards that don't have bifurcation. I hope a cheaper PLX like switch comes out. =\ These looks nice though.
  • MajGenRelativity - Saturday, July 7, 2018 - link

    Applicata has a card that does just that. Be forewarned, it is pricey. PLX chips are mad expensive, so the card is expensive
  • CheapSushi - Wednesday, July 11, 2018 - link

    It's neat for sure and like you said, pricey. But it's x8, not x16 sadly. The true x16 one is passive. I've stared at it a lot, almost clicking the buy button a few times.
  • MajGenRelativity - Thursday, July 12, 2018 - link

    Well, yeah. The x8 is the active one so you don't need bifurcation. I'm not aware of a PLX x16 one
  • Alexvrb - Saturday, July 7, 2018 - link

    Why would you want to couple a very expensive PLX-equipped quad M.2 array with an old system?

    For that matter, outside of video editing... who even needs these?? They are basically only good for a crapton of sequential performance, which by itself isn't very helpful for most workloads. Worse yet I've seen these boards cause performance regression... and it's amplified if the board (like these cheap ones) rely on software RAID.

    I can't help but picture a bunch of "enthusiasts" using these thinking it's going to boost their IOPS to the moon.
  • MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, July 10, 2018 - link

    I assume that someone willing to drop the significant quantity of money on a PLX based card knows what to do with it. It's true that some people have more money than sense, but it's a bit harsh to judge CheapSushi before he says anything indicating that he's using it for gaming or is an "enthusiast"
  • CheapSushi - Wednesday, July 11, 2018 - link

    I'm an enthusiast, gamer, content creator and a homelaber, playing around with machine learning and many other projects; I dabble in everything. I want to max out the 7 slots on all 6 of my whiteboxes rather than just put one x4 NVMe drive in a slot. I'd rather do more with what I have. It's "old" but plenty of people in the homelab world are using even older R710's for example. I want to make the most out of my gear (all X78 based). All of my boards have NVMe boot BIOS updates too. I'm waiting on Zen 2 before I make a larger change to my setup. And, I like to do this for fun as well. I actually ENJOY hardware. Not everything I do is pure practical and sterile.
  • CheapSushi - Wednesday, July 11, 2018 - link

    Before I switched to the medical field, I was a video editor and did music videos.
  • Alexvrb - Saturday, July 7, 2018 - link

    Also, if you want a great combination of blistering random performance and excellent sequential, there's non-M.2-based PCIe SSDs on the market.
  • CheapSushi - Wednesday, July 11, 2018 - link

    Only a few are x8, like Micron's. Most are x4 still.
  • The_Assimilator - Saturday, July 7, 2018 - link

    The CMT4034 is weird... why two PCBs? To prevent heat from SSDs on one side from leaking through to the other?
  • kpb321 - Saturday, July 7, 2018 - link

    I assume it's for clearance and PCB space for the 4 long M.2-22110 drives it supports. The back side of the PCI-E card doesn't have much clearance and you can't fit M.2 drives on that side without technically blocking part of the space for the slot behind it. Doing it on a single side of a single card would mean leaving behind the low profile form factor for the card. I assume that for their target market low profile was too important to loose leaving two stacked PCBs as the only reasonable option.
  • rtho782 - Sunday, July 8, 2018 - link

    Because it's low profile, and otherwise there is no room for SSDs on the back (as they would encroach on the space of the card above).

    If you look at the last two pictures, it's not two full PCBs.
  • Dug - Thursday, July 12, 2018 - link

    Is there any bandwidth or other performance issues if you use one of these along with a video card at x16 and also 2 on board m.2 slots, due to limited pci-e lanes? (On consumer Intel and AMD motherboards)
  • stevengerazdnn345 - Monday, July 16, 2018 - link

    GIGABYTE B2B sounds well. I must buy one. The post is really useful.
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