PCI-E Splitter

[SirNeo]

Hello dear miners

Has someone used/still using a PCI-E splitter? I have two ideas and from my previous search both are possible, it depends about my luck and the mainboard capability but i want a 2nd opinion from someone that used/is still using.

1. My mainboard has only 1x PCI-E x16 and 5x PCI-E x1 and i want to use in one of the x1 ports a splitter ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01ERXUEOM/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 ) in order to be able to have an 8 cards RIG.

2. I'm curious if I can build a cheap RIG using and old (refurbished) LENOVO ThinkCentre M58p SFF (less than 100euro) and 1x or 2x of the above spliter or something like this https://www.amazon.com/RingBuu-Adapter-USB3-0-Rabbet-Ethereum/dp/B0756ZWGZX/ref=sr_1_3?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1519493151&sr=1-3&keywords=pcie+splitter

Thank you in advance!

[megainarmy]

Splitter with aliexpress (your option 2) works perfectly in many of my rigs, I recommend to buy.
But the people say that it does not fit some motherboards older than 4-5 years, so there's hardly anyone who will say.
You need to try. One tried a motherboard with a splitter, if everything works, then you can continue.

[pickleburglar]

I have 2 kinds of pcie hubs, the ones with the chip on the extension cards that feeds 4 risers and the ones with the chip on the bigass 4xpcie16x riser.

Both work great on some boards but work in limited capacity or not at all in some other boards and a few were permanently* damaged by the experience. I've tested them with 10 different boards maybe, including some laptop boards via mini pcie.

Basically anything older than 5 years that I've tried doesn't work with them. Either you get no cards showing up at all or just permanent error 43.

They also mostly don't work with laptop boards or integrated cpu boards. For example on a mobile HM55 + i3 350m I could only get it to recognize 1 card. On j1900 based boards 2 max. On a A70M based board 4 cards max.

I haven't figured out what the limiting factor is, all of these boards can see any number of other pcie cards plugged into them like usb hubs or sound cards but video cards are different. It doesn't seem like its a memory address issue since the result was the same whether it was 1080Ti's that I plugged in or some old 1950x's.

On modern full featured ATX size boards they work great though.

*plugging in 5 on the A70M board corrupted the bios in a way that it couldn't be restored by normal means. I had to dig it out and flash it externally which is not something you can do without specialized tools so beware

[Amstellodamois]

Option 2. works well for me.

[Turkish88]

Before using this splitter search how many pci-e x lines support chipset of your motherboard

[pickleburglar]

Before using this splitter search how many pci-e x lines support chipset of your motherboard

that doesn't matter, pcie hubs create lanes that share the 1x lane they have to the motherboard

[smoothyvo]

I use the 2nd one currently. I first used it on a ECS IC780M-A from 2010 and it worked fine. Now its on a MSI z270.

[Amstellodamois]

BUT, while I've never had an issue with 9 GPUs (using an extender and two M.2 adapters), I run into trouble since I've added my last three cards.