So after a 9 month jaunt with trying all varieties of PCI-E Extenders I decided to put together my findings. When i started out on this project I couldn't find any solid evidence of the working or not so I found out for myself. As you may be aware, I built a mini-itx rig a while back, the rig was inside an existing project so space was tight to say the least, that plus the fact that I needed it to contain an ATI card (longer than 670's etc) meant I had to use an extender. So armed with a XFX6870 an an Asrock Z68 board I set about buying a PCI-E Extender. The first one was a typical offering from eBay, it was a 5cm non shielded affair. After installing it within the case and attaching my XFX card I had all sorts of problems. First of all the PC booted but using the onboard HD3000 so the GPU was not recognised at all. After a little moving around and repositioning (attempting to negate any interference) I managed to get the card to be recognised but it refused to boot, crashing at the opening screen in Windows and not even booting under ML. I noticed at this time a company selling shielded PCI-E Extenders and also claiming that they are of superior quality internally too, so I ordered one of these, they cost considerably more than the eBay/generic items but side by side they are barely any different, the only real difference was the shielding, but this was a half effort really anyway as it doesn't cover the ribbon all the way to the connectors etc and is simply a wrap around. This one did though show in the bios immediately, and in pretty much all positions, but thats as far as it got. After sending it back and being sent another in replacement which performed identically I admitted defeat. Regardless of any efforts on my behalf it simply would not boot! The only other cards I had to test on the system in this state were Matrox double headed low power cards, with one monitor attached it would boot into Windows and then crash at the slightest load, i.e. the screensaver loading etc! So although not a conclusive test, my findings only confirm my suspicions, that PCI-E extenders generally are just not up to gaming with a decent GPU, the bandwidth is just not up to it at all, so save your pennies and buy yourself a 670, it will fit into most m-itx cases/mobo's and save a tonne of hassle! Hope this is helpful to you guys! Wejj
Didn't Antony Leather use one of these on his scratch built ITX rig? I wonder if he has had similar problems? Thanks for writing this up by the way, well worth knowing.
I bought a decent one and it was fine for normal use, but under heavy load in BOINC it was creating maths errors that didn't occur when seated in a PCI-E slot. Just my experience, I wonder whether these new fangled power conscious GPU's are far more touchy, especially as we head for PCI-E3 ? dunx
