1 to 8 riser card any good?

[Jimie]

Anyone know how efficient these 1 to 8 riser cards are sold on Amazon? And is it possible to add more than 1 so that i can expand to more 8 GPUs per system?

https://www.amazon.com/Motherboard-...d=1522197574&sr=1-4&keywords=biostar+graphics

 

[thecoolnessrune]

It depends on what you are using them for. If you're thinking of using it for mining, the cards work fine, as the cards barely transfer any data. Any other use is dependent on the workload and how much data they have to send over the PCI-e port. For gaming for instance, it would be a very measurable performance hit. For many HPC workloads it would be disastrous.

As far as numbers, I believe AMD currently supports up to 13 GPU's with their driver, as does NVIDIA unless you use the specialized P106 mining driver.

 

[richaron]

Also OP is clueless and linked a PCIe USB card. Which won't help with GPUs. I guess if you just write "mining" in the janky product description you'll still get a few bites.

OP: It's good you're asking advice, but it's obvious you don't know much about computers. And nobody can tell you everything you need to know in one go. But I'll start by suggesting you look up the difference between USB and PCIe, plus try to learn how a GPU is connected to a system.

Edit: sample from linked product description:

• "System support: the best mining WIN10 system"

 

[thecoolnessrune]

Also OP is clueless and linked a PCIe USB card. Which won't help with GPUs. I guess if you just write "mining" in the janky product description you'll still get a few bites.

OP: It's good you're asking advice, but it's obvious you don't know much about computers. And nobody can tell you everything you need to know in one go. But I'll start by suggesting you look up the difference between USB and PCIe, plus try to learn how a GPU is connected to a system.

Edit: sample from linked product description:

• "System support: the best mining WIN10 system"

Um @richaron that is a mining card. It is indeed a PCIe card that breaks a 16x slot into 8 1x slots with a PCI-e switch chip. The 1x PCI-e signal is sent over a USB 3.0 cable, because the same standards that make that cable good for USB 3.0 also make it good to send a 1x PCI-e lane a couple of meters, so you have more flexibility in mounting your mining cards. The other side of the USB 3.0 cable will have a little adapter that turns the USB port into a 1x PCI-e slot like this one: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIABFE6SF4131

It's not USB, it's just using a USB cable to send a PCI-e signal down.

 

[richaron]

I have been shamed

I'll just ride my high horse back to the rock I crawled out from..

 

[thecoolnessrune]

I have been shamed

I'll just ride my high horse back to the rock I crawled out from..

No shame We're all here to learn. That's the great thing about forums. When this mining thing started I thought they were connecting these cards over USB as well, but I couldn't ever find a USB Host Controller on those cards. Took me a bit to realize they were just using USB 3.0 for the cable because it can handle a single PCI-e lane and didn't require some custom-designed high-priced cable. Super cheap and readily available for miners to get a hold of. It's a novel idea that makes a lot of sense from that viewpoint.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yeah, the USB3.0 cable threw me for a loop initially, but that's what I surmised, was that they were actually sending PCI-E signalling over the cable, but used a USB3.0 cable, because the specifications (twisted-pair / shielding) made it a good match.

 

[wahdangun]

Btw Will it capable to use that for something like custom managed switch ? I mean is there Linux distro or some os and I'm curious about the performance.