I am looking at extending a PCI port so it is paralle to the motherboard, or is there more to it than a simple extendor?
What you're after is a riser card. It basically is a circuit board that plugs into the PCI, then has another PCI socket on it (and lines simply connecting the plug and socket). Can't help you much for a supplier down under I'm afraid, but to see what's around, linitx.com have a pretty good selection. Hope this helps
http://www.servercase.com/miva/miva...C&Product_Code=1U32&Category_Code=1U/2U+Riser Now if only I could find one here for that cheap!
It would probably involve at least a very exact 2 layer circuit board with a shitload of VIAs, so very hard to make yourself.
I believe that in one mod, someone here made their own AGP riser with a just a whole bunch of wire, a AGP socket and plug. It actually worked better than some of the commercial ones advertised. Very hard? no. Labor intensive? Yes. Search around for 'homemade AGP riser' and similar stuff to see if you can find the thread.
Worked better? I would have thought it either works or it doesn't? TBH it may not be difficult to make one, but it's going to be a hell of a lot more time-consuming than buying one, and do you really trust your own soldering that much? I know I don't!
Yeah he could only find agp risers that were 2x compatable or something like that, but he could get the card to run at 4x with his, if AGP fastwrites was turned off or something like that.
ehhhhhh... That's like playing with fire in a paper house... Building your own is such an incredibly bad idea that it just isn't even funny, at least with PCI. I'm not familiar with how tight the specs are for AGP - but I'd guess they'd be just as tight, if not tigher, than PCI. Sure it may have worked for him - but chances are it's wayyyy out of spec, and would not work with all combinations of hardware.
found it. http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=50470&page=2&pp=20 He got 8x with no fastwrites when commercial ones said they only supported 1x or 2x. If you got time to try it, why not. If you soldering is good, I would imagine that the worse that could happen is it won't work. But at least search around and see if you can find one that suits your needs and isnt that costly before you attempt it though. Could save some headaches.
Of course, it's also possible that the commercial ones can support most cards at 4 or 8x, but say 2x for warrany reasons or such. And the worst case with a homemade riser is that you destroy both your card and motherboard, or worse.
these riser cards would be cool for a mod to squash stuff into a small space, or a completely cardless mobo, might look strange, but cool.
Does anyone want to guess what would happen if you had two extenders coming out of one AGP slot and stuck two cards in there?
Scenario one: You let out the magic blue smoke. Scenario two: the motherboard panics and won't start up at all since it can't establish contact with a graphics card.
i was looking to use the same thing for pci-e. i would just like to clear up for myself what youre saying: the data speed is slower with a riser? if its true, thats sucky. thanks
hmm i thought most extenders were completely passive. So the only problem is thats its not a NBC (Noiseless Binary Channel). I would of expected the commercial ones to be much better at this than hobbiest ones.
