PCIe splitter?

[GP781]

Hey guys, is there any way under $50 USD to split 1 gen 3 PCIe x16 into 2 x8 slots, without motherboard bifurcation? Please let me know if this is possible, and thanks in advance!

(It's for running a AMD Radeon Pro WX 4100 and a 5Gbps NIC off of 1 slot)

[IBM_THINKPAD_R51]

without bifurcation you would need to use a pci-e switch card

but they introduce latency

[GP781]

How much latency are we talking here, as long as it's not super noticeable doing stuff like encoding for Plex or something, it's fine. I won't be gaming or anything off of this, but in the future I might stream games a bit, not sure though.

[Electronics Wizardy]

If this is for plex, have you considred a usb 5gbit nic? Might make this a lot simpler. 

 

Also if this is for encoding, I'd go Intel arc or Nvidia over AMD for gpus, but there can be edge cases.

[GP781]

I haven't really looked into USB NICs, because I might want to get a 10 gig one in the future for a proxmox cluster with ceph shared storage, but I'll check them out.

It'll be partially for plex but also might get used as a little workstation, and like I said, I plan to use it as a proxmox node too, so yeah it's gonna be for a lot of things.

[Electronics Wizardy]

5 minutes ago, GP781 said:

I haven't really looked into USB NICs, because I might want to get a 10 gig one in the future for a proxmox cluster with ceph shared storage, but I'll check them out.

It'll be partially for plex but also might get used as a little workstation, and like I said, I plan to use it as a proxmox node too, so yeah it's gonna be for a lot of things.

Do you have this GPU already? Its likely worse than a iGPU you already have transcoding wise. 

 

But that price point is way too low for a proper pcie switch.

 

Whats the rest of the system?

[GP781]

3 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Do you have this GPU already? Its likely worse than a iGPU you already have transcoding wise. 

 

But that price point is way too low for a proper pcie switch.

 

Whats the rest of the system?

Yeah I do have a few of them, and I saw AMD Ryzen 5 1600's are only 30 bucks so I was just gonna make a cheap proxmox cluster, I was asking about a pcie splitter because it would be nice to just shove them into a 10 inch rack

[GP781]

I could get different gpu's, I got 5 of them out of storage of a small business, but I'd like to build kinda powerful proxmox cluster in a 10 inch rack because I have a 14u one of those, and it would be cool to use it, but I don't want to throw a ton of money into it.

[mariushm]

It would be easier and cheaper to  get a M.2 to pci-e x1-x4 adapter board and run the network card from this M.2 slot.

 

https://www.ebay.com/itm/256644017633 (with molex to power connector)

https://www.ebay.com/itm/285843451740 (with sata to power connector)

 

Pair it with a pci-e x1 or pci-e x4 riser cable and you could install an ethernet card anywhere.

 

The power cable is needed to introduce 12v into the pci-e x4 slot, because the M.2 connector only offers 3.3v.

 

Here's a version that combines the riser cable with the adapter, but it's only pci-e x1 (enough for a 5gbps ethernet card) : https://www.ebay.com/itm/365306889841

Still needs 12v from the power supply (5v only needed if you want the usb port to work)

 

You don't say what motherboard you have, so can't really help you more without all the information needed.

[GP781]

6 hours ago, mariushm said:

It would be easier and cheaper to  get a M.2 to pci-e x1-x4 adapter board and run the network card from this M.2 slot.

 

https://www.ebay.com/itm/256644017633 (with molex to power connector)

https://www.ebay.com/itm/285843451740 (with sata to power connector)

 

Pair it with a pci-e x1 or pci-e x4 riser cable and you could install an ethernet card anywhere.

 

The power cable is needed to introduce 12v into the pci-e x4 slot, because the M.2 connector only offers 3.3v.

 

Here's a version that combines the riser cable with the adapter, but it's only pci-e x1 (enough for a 5gbps ethernet card) : https://www.ebay.com/itm/365306889841

Still needs 12v from the power supply (5v only needed if you want the usb port to work)

 

You don't say what motherboard you have, so can't really help you more without all the information needed.

Thanks, I'll look at that, and I don't have a motherboard yet so stuff is flexible.