Question regarding PCIE 3.0 X16 PCIE Splitter

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electricfirebolt

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Mar 29, 2012
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I'm currently having an situation where I have a Mini ITX Board with one PCIE 3.0 X16 slot and I require two slots, one for a soundcard (xonar d2x) and one for a capture card (elgato hd60 pro), Does anyone know whether this adapter will be able to provide enough bandwidth,
both devices require minimum of X1 PCIE. I notice the riser uses USB 3.0 cables.
s-l1600.jpg

 
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BFG-9000
Mini-ITX is kind of like having a laptop as it's not really designed for expansion except through USB, with the one exception of a GPU. You could get a USB capture card and use digital audio out to high quality DACs in your receiver.

It's not the USB cables that are the issue as they are just being used as handy 9-pin extension cords fpr the PCIe lane--nothing is converted to USB. The problem is none of these adapters are designed for anything but mining, where not only does bandwidth not matter, neither does latency--which does matter quite a lot for audio. What are the chances that the onboard PCIe switch chip is designed to not cause DPC latency issues?

Seriously, google DPC latency audio and you will find thousands...
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BFG-9000

BFG-9000

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That splitter is intended to attach two additional x16 cards into a x1 slot for mining, where bandwidth to the cards doesn't matter. As it's only x1, everything attached to it will have to share the bandwidth of a single x1.

Also you'd better make sure using the slot doesn't disable your IGP or you'd end up having to access the desktop remotely due to it running headless.
 
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electricfirebolt

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What about a similar adapter but just for one card. I've notice their is an adapter that plugs into the M.2 Slot and converts to PCIE Slot. Just looking for a way to plugin soundcard. Not sure how much bandwidth the sound card would need. Also adapter uses USB 3.0 cable, will this limit the bandwidth?, Soundcard requires x1 slot.
 
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BFG-9000

BFG-9000

Splendid
Sep 17, 2016
3,423
439
27,090
Mini-ITX is kind of like having a laptop as it's not really designed for expansion except through USB, with the one exception of a GPU. You could get a USB capture card and use digital audio out to high quality DACs in your receiver.

It's not the USB cables that are the issue as they are just being used as handy 9-pin extension cords fpr the PCIe lane--nothing is converted to USB. The problem is none of these adapters are designed for anything but mining, where not only does bandwidth not matter, neither does latency--which does matter quite a lot for audio. What are the chances that the onboard PCIe switch chip is designed to not cause DPC latency issues?

Seriously, google DPC latency audio and you will find thousands of people having audio problems with normal soundcards plugged directly into PCIe slots. The Xonar drivers themselves are known to be worse than Realtek and cause more issues.

If you are determined to use such an unsuitable platform for this, there is such a thing as PCIe bifurcation that can turn a x16 into two x8. It requires BIOS support so you will need to write your own. Or there are active PCIe splitters that use a bridge chip (again, may cause latency issues) that cost more than a nice new ATX motherboard would.
 
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