What else fits in a PCIe 3.0 x16 slot besides a video card?

[Fun Guy]

So, what else fits in a PCIe 3.0 x16 slot besides a video card? Anything? Curious... :ninja:

 

[OlyAR15]

Any PCIe card will fit in a x16 slot. If you mean what else uses that many lanes, I can't think of anything else. RAID cards need x8 but other than that, maybe there are some specialized cards for certain industries?

 

[Ken g6]

maybe there are some specialized cards for certain industries?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi

 

[mfenn]

So, what else fits in a PCIe 3.0 x16 slot besides a video card? Anything? Curious... :ninja:

Well, any shorter PCIe card will fit and work. But if you were referring to other x16 devices:

Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor
Mellanox ConnectX-4 EDR Infiniband adapter
Silicom 6-port 10Gb Ethernet adapter

So basically high bandwidth I/O or coprocessing devices normally found in data centers.

 

[MongGrel]

Any PCIe card will fit in a x16 slot. If you mean what else uses that many lanes, I can't think of anything else. RAID cards need x8 but other than that, maybe there are some specialized cards for certain industries?

A RAID card immediately came to mind myself for some reason, as in have an old one in there with 4x1TB WD RE3s in there for many years now for storage, but yeah are other things I'm not familiar with personally.

I've seen people in other forums talk about need a specific slot for PCI-E and chuckle a bit, they will take any PCI-E, and some think you need one of the special little ones to do it.

Those little ones will even work in them, though depending where they put them might bork your lanes a bit.

My old ASUS P6T7 has 7 of them, I actually had to buy one PCI slot adapter to keep using the Auzentech X-Fi Prelude I've had for years over the on board.

Have a SATA 2 to SATA 3 adapter card in another PCI-E for my two Sammy EVO 120's and the DVD just because it was a faster place to plug the DVD in than the MOBO SATA 2

It's more the fact it's there and backwards compatible, I suppose.

 

[MongGrel]

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/xeon/xeon-phi-detail.html

Actually looks a bit interesting, but probably wouldn't be relevant for or maybe usable for my old board with a X5680 in it.

I remember decades ago have to just stick a coprocessor in builds, the old thing I have probably wouldn't benefit too much from what I'm doing for what they sell for I imagine.

 

[mfenn]

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/xeon/xeon-phi-detail.html

Actually looks a bit interesting, but probably wouldn't be relevant for or maybe usable for my old board with a X5680 in it.

I remember decades ago have to just stick a coprocessor in builds, the old thing I have probably wouldn't benefit too much from what I'm doing for what they sell for I imagine.

It'll work just fine in any board which has a x16 slot. The power profile is basically like a high-end GPU.

The thing to understand about a Phi (other than them being pretty expensive), is that it's basically like CUDA or OpenCL when it comes to acceleration. Your programs have to be specifically coded to take advantage of the Phi. Given that it's a relatively niche product, we're mostly talking about scientific research applications at this point.

At the end of the day, it's basically a 60-core (280-thread) computer that runs Linux. It just so happens to be sitting on a PCIe card.