An expansion card right below a single fan GPU

leburn98 · April 21, 2020

Prior to the current events, I purchased a new GPU for my gaming rig and decided to re-purpose my GTX 1060 (Gigabyte Mini ITX 6G) by adding it to my server. My thought process was let's use the GPU (complete with unlocked drivers) for Plex transcoding, leaving my Ryzen 1700 available for encoding large batches of video files. This works great except for one thing, it killed my expansion :(.

If I want to add a SATA expansion card to my system, it will sit literally millimeters away from the GPU (see pictures). Most SATA expansion cards will cover the bottom quarter of the fan. Would this be sufficient airflow for my use case? The majority of the time, the GPU fan is not spinning. Heavy load makes it spin, obviously.

For those curious as to why I am in this situation to begin with and why I just don't buy a new motherboard. It's simple, I always wanted to use the Fractal Design Node 804 and in order to do so, I needed to either go ITX or Micro-ATX. That is why I opted for the MSI Bazooka V2 for this build. To add to this, I had always intended on going with a cheap single slotted GPU for video out, which would leave me with ample room for one SATA expansion card. However, I found out about the wonderful world of unlocked Nvidia drivers and realized that once unlocked, the GTX 1060 is a transcoding beast. And that's how I arrived here :).

mariushm · April 21, 2020

You can buy a pci-e riser and place it in that area under the motherboard.

Rosewill RCRC-18001 Mining Card, Riser Card, PCIe (PCI Express) 16x to 1x Riser Adapter, USB 3.0 Extension Cable 60cm, 6 pin PCI-E to SATA Power Cable, GPU Riser Adapter, Ethereum Mining Riser Card - Newegg.com

Rosewill RCRC-17001 Mining Card, Riser Card, PCIe (PCI Express) 16x to 1x Riser Adapter, USB 3.0 Extension Cable 60cm, 6 pin PCI-E to SATA Power Cable, GPU Riser Adapter, Ethereum Mining Riser Card - Newegg.com

Small card goes into the pci-e x1 slot, and you use a regular usb 3 cable between the small card and the big card. The usb 3 cable connects only the signal wires from the pci-e x1 slot so you need to power the slot separately through that 6 pin connector. It's a pci-e 6pin connector, but they'll bundle either a pci-e 6pin -> sata or pci-e 6pin / molex adapter with this.

The back is insulated with some rubber material , some even have double sided adhesive, so you can just put them below the board and you can screw your pci-e x1 card to the case.

eBay and Amazon and newegg is full of such cards, some will have straight sata or molex header on board so you don't need to use adapter cables (provided with the adapter)