Is it safe to mine on a full (unpowered) x16 riser?

[Khabaopie]

Hi Everyone, sincere apologies if this a silly question. However, I was wondering if I could mine on a full x16 riser, a "gaming" riser if you can forgive my terminology, I have one lying around from an ITX build I did not so long ago. It's of reasonably good quality, I had a water-cooled and heavily overclocked RTX 2080 Ti on there until recently. I have 3 full PCIE slots on my motherboard but the bottom most is rather obstructed since I am using a compact case. I have been given to understand that mining on an 'unpowered' riser is dangerous, if so, does that piece of advice only pertain to those 1x mining risers but these full x16 risers as well?

I am a collector and have a lot of old, and not so old, GPUs lying around so I have just doing this for fun and as a 'free' way of getting back into Bitcoin by selling altcoins. I'm planning to put one of my Radeon VIIs on there and despite it being a rather power intensive card, it should only draw 75w at maximum from the motherboard right?

My board is a B550 Aorus Master if that helps!

Thanks everyone, and sorry if my question is stupid, I'm new here!

[SalvajeX]

Hi, you should be fine with that.
Have a search in Youtube for 6 x rtx 3060 mining rigs, I guess you are trying to do something similar.

[Khabaopie]

Ok, thanks! I was worried since mining risers are 25+ days delivery from where I live, unless I pay for stupidly inflated prices and shipping from Amazon US.

[FP91G]

I will answer with your terms.
full x16 riser are used to build farms on two types of video cards 470, 480, and 4 GB analogs for mining Ethereum using a lol miner and 3060 so that the Ethereum hash rate does not decrease.
Otherwise, you can use regular x1 raisers. This does not affect the hashrate in any way.
for your video card, be sure to use 6 pin raisers, for example
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002082548102.html?
do not use sata raisers

[Khabaopie]

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind. And thanks for linking that btw it has pretty fast shipping to where I live and for a rather reasonable price, I suppose I can populate all the slots on one of my spare MoBo I have which has only 2 x16 slots but 4 x1 slots.

I should've clarified that my current board only has 3 x16 slots, so 1x and x16 made no difference for me, just wanted to populate the slot quickly and conveniently.

be sure to use 6 pin raisers

Forgive me for another question, but would it be acceptable to adapter that 6-pin with Molex? I'm well aware of the dangers associated with SATA which isn't designed for such power output, but Molex should be fine right? If not, I'll probably just swap my new Be Quiet 1200w PSU to my 2nd dedicated rig.

[JayDDee]

Molex powered risers are fine as long as you only use one per Molex cable.
Pay close attention to the unpowered risers for any signs of overheating while you're
waiting for new powered ones. I wouldn't use unpowered risers long term or unattended.

[Khabaopie]

OK, will do. Thanks again everyone!

[Stanlo]

@khabaopie you don't need to swap your be quiet 1200w powersupply for another, it's more than enough to handle any graphic cards you throw at it, use one molex cable per riser because those cables can only handle a certain watt power

[Khabaopie]

Hi @Stanlo I'm sorry if I wasn't clear but my 1200W PSU is on my primary rig as it is the most stable for my OC as opposed to my CM V850 that I had to RMA. My spare is an old 900W Antec that does not have enough 6-pin PCIE cables since it is not modular if I could not use Molex for the risers. In fact, I'll probably end up using my 1200W unit anyway since I'll need the extra 6+2-pin connectors for all my cards.

[FP91G]

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind. And thanks for linking that btw it has pretty fast shipping to where I live and for a rather reasonable price, I suppose I can populate all the slots on one of my spare MoBo I have which has only 2 x16 slots but 4 x1 slots.

I should've clarified that my current board only has 3 x16 slots, so 1x and x16 made no difference for me, just wanted to populate the slot quickly and conveniently.

be sure to use 6 pin raisers

Forgive me for another question, but would it be acceptable to adapter that 6-pin with Molex? I'm well aware of the dangers associated with SATA which isn't designed for such power output, but Molex should be fine right? If not, I'll probably just swap my new Be Quiet 1200w PSU to my 2nd dedicated rig.

If you follow the standards, then one raiser must be connected to one cable.
I use molex raisers for video cards 470,480,1060,1070 (No more than 120 watts) and other analogs and connect 2 raisers to 1 cable. I do not use adapters and connect the raiser to the power supply.
18 awg cable, no problem in 4 years.
1080 I connect by standards.
For video cards with high consumption, it is necessary to use server modules with a large number of 6-pin and 8-pin connectors.

[jims2321]

I will answer with your terms.
full x16 riser are used to build farms on two types of video cards 470, 480, and 4 GB analogs for mining Ethereum using a lol miner and 3060 so that the Ethereum hash rate does not decrease.
Otherwise, you can use regular x1 raisers. This does not affect the hashrate in any way.
for your video card, be sure to use 6 pin raisers, for example
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002082548102.html?
do not use sata raisers

Why are full x16 riser need for 470/480 cards?  PCI-E 1x work fine from my experience, is there something that running them in a 16x helps with?

[TheMimic1]

Don't rely on unpowered risers because they will start misbehaving in a very short term, I started my crypto adventure using unpowered risers since that's all I can afford then due to some difficultly at the time and I was able to use these risers for few months before I started getting different errors, sometimes the PC won't detect all gpu and most times my PC got hanged or freeze

[FP91G]

I will answer with your terms.
full x16 riser are used to build farms on two types of video cards 470, 480, and 4 GB analogs for mining Ethereum using a lol miner and 3060 so that the Ethereum hash rate does not decrease.
Otherwise, you can use regular x1 raisers. This does not affect the hashrate in any way.
for your video card, be sure to use 6 pin raisers, for example
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002082548102.html?
do not use sata raisers

Why are full x16 riser need for 470/480 cards?  PCI-E 1x work fine from my experience, is there something that running them in a 16x helps with?

You have not carefully read my post.
470/480 with 8 GB memory perfectly mine Ethereum with x1 raisers.
If you want to mine Ethereum on 470/480 with 4 GB memory using a lol miner, then you need to use 16x raisers and motherboards with PCI-E 8x or 16x. Most standard motherboards have PCI-E x16 slot speeds:
x16 in single channel, x8 + x8 / x16 + x4 / in dual channel or x16 + x4 + x4 in three-channel.
2 cards can be installed without raisers,and a raiser may be required to install a third card
https://www.asus.com/Motherboards-Components/Motherboards/All-series/TUF-B450-PRO-GAMING/techspec/

[JayDDee]

I will answer with your terms.
full x16 riser are used to build farms on two types of video cards 470, 480, and 4 GB analogs for mining Ethereum using a lol miner and 3060 so that the Ethereum hash rate does not decrease.
Otherwise, you can use regular x1 raisers. This does not affect the hashrate in any way.
for your video card, be sure to use 6 pin raisers, for example
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002082548102.html?
do not use sata raisers

Why are full x16 riser need for 470/480 cards?  PCI-E 1x work fine from my experience, is there something that running them in a 16x helps with?

You have not carefully read my post.
470/480 with 8 GB memory perfectly mine Ethereum with x1 raisers.
If you want to mine Ethereum on 470/480 with 4 GB memory using a lol miner, then you need to use 16x raisers and motherboards with PCI-E 8x or 16x. Most standard motherboards have PCI-E x16 slot speeds:
x16 in single channel, x8 + x8 / x16 + x4 / in dual channel or x16 + x4 + x4 in three-channel.
2 cards can be installed without raisers,and a raiser may be required to install a third card
https://www.asus.com/Motherboards-Components/Motherboards/All-series/TUF-B450-PRO-GAMING/techspec/

Yes, zombie mode increases PCIe traffic between CPU and GPU so more lanes are required.