Pcie 16x to dual 16x at 8x speeds

[The_Promised_End]

Hi everyone

 

I am doing research to help a friend build a workstation pc for his photo/video editing. My idea was to make a no compromises itx form factor workstation. While doing this I ran into a problem with the itx motherboards. The problem was pcie slots so I made this thread to ask if it is posible to split a single pcie 16x slot into two 8x speed 16x size slots. I want this because I know the gpu can run fine at 8x bandwith and I need to be able to use a pcie based ssd since the motherboard does not have m.2 or any ssd supported inteface that is not slow sata 6 gigabit. Also the motherboard is the ASRock - EPC612D4I

 

Thank you for the help

[Electronics Wizardy]

you can, but you need a active spliter, but there aren't many out there. Passive splitters need board support. 

 

Do you really need mini itx?

 

Id also look at ryzen, its gonna be faster unless you get into the 10core + parts.

 

For photo and video work there is no difference between sata 6 and nvme drives.

 

 

[Damascus]

I've heard of this before, unfortunately its basically impossible.  I suggest your friend gets a Ryzen or X99 build

Edited May 10, 2017 by Damascus
added "or"

[8-Bit Ninja]

Read this:

 

[The_Promised_End]

2 minutes ago, Damascus said:

I've heard of this before, unfortunately its basically impossible.  I suggest your friend gets a Ryzen X99 build

ok thanks for the help

[W-L]

4 minutes ago, The_Promised_End said:

Hi everyone

 

I am doing research to help a friend build a workstation pc for his photo/video editing. My idea was to make a no compromises itx form factor workstation. While doing this I ran into a problem with the itx motherboards. The problem was pcie slots so I made this thread to ask if it is posible to split a single pcie 16x slot into two 8x speed 16x size slots. I want this because I know the gpu can run fine at 8x bandwith and I need to be able to use a pcie based ssd since the motherboard does not have m.2 or any ssd supported inteface that is not slow sata 6 gigabit. Also the motherboard is the ASRock - EPC612D4I

 

Thank you for the help

It's possible using a PLX chip based epxansion card as it needs to be able to know which card it's communicating with to allocate resources. Asus did this a while back when they had their 4 way crossfire backplanes that you added onto a standard ATX board but it was limited to a specific one. 

[The_Promised_End]

3 minutes ago, W-L said:

It's possible using a PLX chip based epxansion card as it needs to be able to know which card it's communicating with to allocate resources. Asus did this a while back when they had their 4 way crossfire backplanes that you added onto a standard ATX board but it was limited to a specific one. 

do you know of any of these expansion cards also thanks very helpfull

[W-L]

Just now, The_Promised_End said:

do you know of any of these expansion cards also thanks very helpfull

There are a lot of options but mainly for server applications, so I'm not 100% sure on compatibility with consumer boards. 

 

[The_Promised_End]

2 minutes ago, W-L said:

There are a lot of options but mainly for server applications, so I'm not 100% sure on compatibility with consumer boards. 

 

ok i will dig some more thanks

[The_Promised_End]

3 minutes ago, W-L said:

There are a lot of options but mainly for server applications, so I'm not 100% sure on compatibility with consumer boards. 

 

also the mobo i am using is a server mobo it is part of asrocks rack line does that change things

[W-L]

1 minute ago, The_Promised_End said:

also the mobo i am using is a server mobo it is part of asrocks rack line does that change things

Here are some that may work but like I said it may be a bit of guessing game as it can conflict with the BIOS on the board. Check this thread here it's full of really good information regarding using PCI-E risers such as these.

https://hardforum.com/threads/pcie-bifurcation.1870298/

 

http://www.supermicro.com/support/resources/Riser.cfm

[The_Promised_End]

2 minutes ago, W-L said:

Here are some that may work but like I said it may be a bit of guessing game as it can conflict with the BIOS on the board. Check this thread here it's full of really good information regarding using PCI-E risers such as these.

https://hardforum.com/threads/pcie-bifurcation.1870298/

 

http://www.supermicro.com/support/resources/Riser.cfm

thanks so much

[mariushm]

There will be very little benefit in going with a SSD on pci-e for video editing.

By a Ryzen 7 1700 and a mATX or ATX board , if you want with a m.2 slot. The AM4 processors have a dedicated pci-e v3.0 x4 connection to the m.2 slot so they can go fast. They also have pci-e 3.0 x16 which normally can be split in two x8 easily.

 

If you want to make him a kick ass computer, just pack it with memory, shove 64 GB of DDR4 in it and create a 32-48 GB  ramdisk. Then every time he works on the project, he can copy the raw files from the SSD to the ram disk when he loads the project in an editor and he'll basically work with the files in timeline and everything directly from RAM.  Faster than any SSD and he'll still have the raw files on the SSD/hard drive if there's power failure or whatever.

 

A 6 gbps will give you up to 550 MB/s read and write speeds and that's enough as most video content is at most in the 100mbps range (12 MB/s) ... SSDs can handle multiple files read easily.

 

Here's a suggestion for a cheap and OK mATX motherboard for a workstation (provided you won't do much overclocking, because the VRM is probably not strong enough to more than light overclocking) : https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813145003

This one would also look , and may look super cool all white: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813144046