i need some damn pci-e 16X extention cable! I could make my mod look a fair chunk better if I could just get my hands on some! I know there are riser cards out there but thats not what I need. What I want to do is take my 8800GTX in its standard ATX case (so the cooler points down) and flip it, so the cooler points up. I can build a good strong scaffold to hold the card in that position no sweat, but I need the cable to do it, and I cant find any anywhere! Anyone know any awsome modding stores?
i gotta tell ya, an electron runs through a cable pretty damn fast. And, 680i runs a 7X pci-e slot off the middle and a 16X one of the bottem, there differant distances from the south bridge. Maybe Ill try to make my own cable We have the technology... we can make it faster, cooler....
I've seen a project where somebody painstakingly soldered wires to the pins of an agp card to fit it in a cramped case. It worked, but I hesitate to say that it was worth it.
Can you try to make a cable? Sure... can you make one that works?... You can do anything with enough funding. However, I think that PCI express operates at 2.5 ghz, (not 100% sure, but given that SATA operates at 1.5ghz this seems reasonable) That is microwave frequencies. http://www.micro-coax.com/pages/products/ProductTypes/DelayLines.asp this company sells short lenghts of coax cable to be used as delay lines in microwave and radio frequencies. Pieces of wire to be used for a delay, nothing else, just wire. If you make an extension, *definitely* need the TX+ and TX- and the RX+ and RX- leads for each channel are exactly the same lenght. Mismatches in the lenght of that will add inductance to the circuit, and too much inductance will start to degrade signal quality. I'm not sure how matched the different channels have to be in phase, so that may, or may not be an issue. So yeah, it can be done, but your traces need to get longer by exactly the same length. The best thing I would imagine. would be a connector that plugs into the slot, and it has a flexible PCB that runs to a socket soldered to the flexi-pcb. Also, on a little side note... ever look at your motherboard and see a bunch of squiggly traces? thats them matching the length of different traces. However, I have seen a homemade AGP8x extension cable that worked here on bit tech, so why not PCI E if you can work it right.
god I hate keyboard-IE7 relations. I hit the period key along with something else and it took me back, erasing everything Id typed up. I could make a cable with the legnth of each contact being withen 1mm of each other. I have run my system with the graphics card slanted in, so that the contacts closest to the DVI port were a good 2mm futher out of the socket then the ones at the back. However, the cable would have to be as long as the slot to allow for me to twist it completly around. Seems like alot of work for something thats purly asthetic. I want to be able to see my full coverage 8800 block (possibly to be the Stealth) as it does its job. Option A: I dont, and I just make a cool lookin backplate out of some acrylic. Option B: I make the cable and prey it works. With this I also have to make the scaffold. Option C: I put the block on the reverse side of the card, and bend a nice piece of copper sheet around to act as a heat duct, contacting the front side of the core, and then whipping around over top of the card and between the block and the PCB. I'm leaning toward option C... now that I know no one makes these cables.
so you want to make a U shaped bit of copper sheet and have the gpu cooler on the other side of the card? if so then i dont think the copper would transfer the heat fast enough , thats y companies use heat pipes and not just strips of copper you could however keep the stock cooler on the normal side but raise it up a it and then just do as suggested in C (you would however loss alot of space pci slot wise)
Speed of light = 1 foot per nanosecond You can bet that your electrical signals only propagate at 25-75% of that, so say 6 inches per nanosecond. PCIe operates at 2Gbaud per channel, which is half a nanosecond per cycle, so actually, one cycle is going to be 3 inches of cable, so yes, cable lengths are pretty critical once you factor in rise and fall times due to the capacitance of the cable and connectors. The chances of you making a reliable extension cable that keeps 16 lanes all in sync are pretty damn slim. 1 lane may be possible for a hobbyist though... So yeah, option C sounds cool.
you want something like this ? pci-e 16X ribbon cable extender they do exist, but do you wanna pay the price they cost?
Google is your friend here. You need one of these. From this site EDIT: Damn TTmodder beat me to it, damn wireless being so slow.
I know someone else has already backed me up on this, but I'd like to assure you that distances and timing can be an issue in high-frequency electronics. Did you know that the maximum length for a USB cable is determined by timing, not by resistance or interference? Granted, that limit is five feet and you're only talking about six inches, but I'm also pretty sure PCIe is a bit more demanding than USB2.0. As someone else suggested, in this case the overall length might not make a difference, but any differences sure will. If you make sure every wire is exactly the same length, you're probably okay. Give it a try with a cheap card and board and see if it works.
So this is all about getting a good look on top of your GPU cooler? Damn, safe your money, safe the frustration of making a high frequency cable, just turn your motherboard upside down and you'll have your look on your GPU cooler. Damn, why are you guys always getting so complicated ideas? Keep it easy...
"solving challenging problems" -yes "but make something simple more complicated than it must be" -no Anyway, creating a wired extension for a PCI-e slot isn't an interesting challenge. You could just make a plain copy of the commercially available version postd earlier. You can use layout software to create two PCB's. The first one connects to the PCI-e slot on the motherboard and routes the signals to a number of connectors(I would suggest IDE connectors). The second one has the same number of connectors and routes the signals to a PCI-e slot where the card will be inserted. This way you can use IDE cables to connect the boards. The advantage of this is, that IDE cables are already made to handle high frequency signals. The wires from connector to connector all have the exact same length. Soldering wires by hand from slot to graphics card really isn't an option. You can't get enough precision into hand soldering the wires.
IDE cables handle 133MB/sec over 16 bits, so that's ((133*8)/16)/1000 = 0.0665 Gbaud per signal wire, which is a few orders of ten less than the 2Gbaud you'd need for PCIe. Also, once you've gone to the expense of creating a couple of boards that complex (they're most likely 2 or maybe even 3 layer) and done all the soldering, it'd be easier to just buy that pre-made one. But yeah, not that exciting a project... remember there may be other reasons for not turning the motherboard upside down.
PCIe electrical and mechanical specs Based on the specs, it's hard to say if the cable will work, but PCIe is much more electrically tolerant than PCI. If you want to move the heatsink, you will be limited by the heat capacity of the connection from chip to heatsink. Heat pipes would be the best bet if you can find one for your card. What about water cooling instead?
if you want the tops of your cooler showing, i guess another option that noone has mentioned yet is inverting the motherboard/tray...will give you the tops of all the cards then
