this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2025
27 points (88.6% liked)

Selfhosted

45404 readers
531 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I'm looking at quad port 2.5Gbe Intel PCIe cards. These cards seem to be mostly x4 physically (usually PCIe gen 3) whilst I have a PCIe Gen4 X1 slot, which is more the theoretical bandwidth that the card can support. The card needs at the most PCIE Gen 3 X2 == PCIE Gen 4 X1 in terms of bandwidth.

How do I fit the card into a PCIe x1 slot? Won't it lose performance if all the pins are not connected to the physical PCIe connector? Is there a PCIe x1 riser that the community likes that is somewhat affordable?

Thanks

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 1 week ago (3 children)

If you don't want to risk modifying the slot, try one of the cheap PCIe risers on amazon and send it back if it doesn't work. You will need a case with a couple of extra slots under the motherboard in order to fit the riser in there though.

It will run slower, but that probably won't be an issue unless you plan to max out all 4 ports simultaneously.

[–] i_am_not_a_robot@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I did this but buying these on Amazon is scary. Try to find one that won't burn your house down.

[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, I definitely wouldn't recommend putting something power hungry like a GPU in one of these. A NIC will be fine though.

The ones on Amazon are intended to run GPUs for crypto farms, but they're all brands you've never heard of with dubious claims and they've all got at least one review where either the device was defective or something was installed incorrectly and it caused damages.

Even maxing out the ports won't be a problem. Even 6 gigabit ports don't saturate a PCIe Gen 3 X1 slot in terms of bandwidth. But will the card work at all if all the physical pins are not connected electrically to the slot?

[–] marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I cannot see any decent PCIE X1 to X16 risers on amazon. Everything is USB based which I don't want

[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They are not USB based, they just happen to use a USB 3 cable to carry the PCIe signals.

Oh. I thought they were using USB. Thanks

[–] Nollij@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

USB the protocol, or just uses a USB cable? If it's not using the protocol, the cables are a cheap way of getting cables of a certain spec.

I thought they were using the USB protocol. Thanks