Corsair Premium PCIe 3.0 x16 Extension Cable, 300mm (EMI shielded, fully flexible, 90-degree female PCIe connector) Black

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For those of you sporting a PCIe-4,0 GPU like the newer AMD Radeon RX5700XT, LINKUP has updated their cables to support full PCIe-4.0 x16 Bandwidth with their newest models. Premium risers have higher quality PCIe slots. Before you buy any riser, it’s important to note which direction of the slot you need. Lian-Li cables are 90 degree slots, Thermaltake risers are straight with the slot directly on the other side of the cable. Extension cables are designed to allow for more flexible placement of your GPU. They’re ideal for maximizing your cooling system’s performance. If you’re a content creator or gamer, this is the type of “riser” you want to invest in.

For those that do opt for it, do make sure that the required room in your case exists. Is Your SSD Compatible With the Adapter? If you are like one of many people who have only used their motherboard’s PCIe slots to plug in a GPU, then you will find great utility from an M.2 PCIe adapter. Especially because the motherboard’s chipset has a limited amount of PCIe lanes it can access. Other PCB materials such as Megtron 6 have a better frequency response and experience less signal loss but come at a significant cost premium. For example, Megtron 6 is about seven times the cost of FR4. Other materials that can operate in the microwave frequency range have an even higher cost premium. The equation below approximates the signal loss in dB/inch due to trace loss and dielectric loss. Ever since manufacturers started designing innovative PC cases, placing GPUs vertically, or workstation users and miners needing more GPUs than easily fit inside standard cases, riser cables have become an integral part for many PC-Builders. There is one Component that has not kept up with the minification of many PC-Parts: the Graphics Card.

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The PCIe 3.0 standard is quite old. There are no PCIe 4.0 graphics cards at this time, but PCI-SIG already announced preliminary PCIe 5.0 specs, which are to be approved by all involved parties. I think it’s still a long time before we start seeing 5.0 devices. PCI-Express Revisions LINKUP is one of the most well-known brands in the market for PCIe riser cables. There’s an option for pretty much every kind of user, and their PCIe 4.0 riser cables offer amazing value for money with great reliability too.

A riser cable is essentially a cable that allows you to extend the PCIe port. This is great for installing multiple pieces of hardware in a cramped space. But more importantly, if you plan to mount your GPU vertically inside your PC cabinet, you need a PCIe riser cable. But with so many options to choose from, what are some of the best PCIe 4.0 riser cables out there? Of course, if you do both, Mining and Gaming, for example, having a Motherboard with a single x16 slot with a GPU in it for Gaming, and a bunch of Mining GPUs attached to the x1 Slots would be a possibility. What Are PCIe Extension Cables? Poweredriser cables utilize a secondary power supply. This is usually an internal USB connection, but it can also be SATA or even a MOLEX port. Generally, powered risers connect to an x1 or x4 PCIe port and have an x16 adapter for the GPU. As a result, they’re usually used by crypto miners. By their nature, GPUs are still fairly large and bulky. They have built-in fans that require a certain amount of space.Important to mention, is that this boost in performance is mostly relevant in terms of the SSD’s sequential read, and write speeds.

Though mostly outweighed by its merits, the M.2 PCIe adapter is not without its inherent disadvantages. Let’s take a look at the most common complaints when it comes to the application of this peripheral. It Occupies PCIe Slots & Lanes That Are Limited & might obstruct other components In fact, with a four-way M.2 PCIe adapter – and its accompanying NVMe SSDs in RAID 10 mode – you can see more than double the performance of a standard NVMe drive.

Zen 2 and Zen 3 Ryzen CPUs come with an identical amount of PCIe lanes (24); though four go toward the chipset. These are useful for those that have an older M.2 SATA SSD – like the Crucial MX500 – occupying one of their M.2 motherboard slots, and want to situate it together with a new NVMe drive. Space constraints: Better / Possible GPU placement for Single- or Multi-GPU Configurations & possibly better cooling. Especially for low-profile GPUs in Small Form Factor Cases that would otherwise clash with low-profile CPU Coolers.

Instead, it will be downgraded to only utilizing eight lanes. Will the M.2 PCIe Adapter Fit In Your Case? So, long story short, for PCIe-Riser cables, you’ll have to know a couple of things before you can start shopping for one: M.2 PCIe adapters can come with, or without, a heatsink. If you are confident that the cooling within your case is sufficient – or already have an M.2 heatsink – you can skip this option.

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PCIe extenders became popular few years ago when the first bitcoin mining crazy has begun. At the time many different extenders were available, but only the popularity of mining has created a new market segment with 1x wide extenders. Those risers have a completely different purpose from the conventional riser. This review focuses on gaming risers, but we will test Bitcoin risers as well, to give you some idea what kind of performance difference are we looking at. PCIe extender types For workstation builds, there also exists an M.2 PCIe adapter that occupies 16 CPU PCIe lanes and holds four or even eight additional NVMe SSDs. That being said, if the NVMe SSD is plugged into its appropriate PCIe interface, it makes no difference whether or not it is done so via the PCIe slot or a motherboard’s M.2 slot.