Bitcoin Forum

Can I run a gpu for bitcoin on a pci slot.  If so, what is needed.  Thanks.

Unable to as far as I'm aware. All gpu's that are worth while/able to hash are pcie. There are pci to pcie adapters but I've not heard of anyone having success.

People have reported success with this. Basically you need a pci to pcie adapter and a riser with molex. Here is a recent thread about this.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=45243.0

Ye, I bought a PCI->PCIe x16 raiser a long time ago and there was no problems at all other than physical stability..

Though, I lost 5Mhash due to latency but I guess most modern BIOS can fine tune that.. (was using a 7 year old MoBo just to show that it worked)

Yeap, that was what I am doing buy a PCI to PCI-E convertor.  You can reuse the old systems you have.

Excellent, I did not know you could do this. I've got a few old PCs with M/Bs with just PCI slots. Just need the GPUs and extenders :)

PCI to PCI-E adaptors are available, I got some from Ebay but they really cost a bomb, it may be more cost effective to get a 2nd hand motherboard with a PCI-E 16x

Just be careful -- I bought a used MSI motherboard with an Opteron CPU and 2 PCI-E slots, but they didn't work with most modern video cards! Turned out they were PCI-E 1.1 instead of 2.0, and this particular mobo had problems with certain video cards -- such as ATI 5XXX and 6XXX series cards, that's all...

I spent way too much on that mobo. That experience completely soured me on buying cheap "older" mobos with PCI-E slots.

On the other hand, I got some old Dell mobos for $10 each that have (1) PCI-E slot -- I'm using one of those at the moment, but I used to have 2 of them set up.
The stupid things have (1) PCI slot as well, but when you have a card in the PCI-E slot it covers up the PCI slot! So I can't even use the PCI slot.

It must be something other than PCIe 1.1 that was causing issues.  PCIe is both forward and backwards compatible.

PCIe 1.1 card in 2.0 slot is fine.
PCIe 2.0 card in 1.1 slot is fine.

You are simply limited to bandwidth of the lesser protocol but then again a serial cable has more than enough bandwidth for a miner.

Indeed. I've got an old socket 940 SLI board running two ATI GPUs. The board only supports PCIe 1.1. As you go back in time, motherboards were less well made, and much more of a pain in the ass, so there are a lot of other potential issues.

I bought mine for 20$ from China via Ebay, took like a week to get it though..

I got it at about 1/2 the price, also from China, I guess nearly everything in the world are somehow assembled or produced in China.