external card bay

[hpr]

does anybody know if, and if, where, you can get an external pci/pci-e expansion card device box thingy, like seen here?

if you know where i can get one, that doesn't cost $25k.

[Matir]

The NVIDIA Quadro Plex is hardly a pci/pci-e "expansion card device box thingy". It's a special-purpose graphics processing box that uses NVIDIA GPUs in it. As far as I can tell, it's hugely proprietary, requiring a special pci-e card in the host machine.

What is your goal?

[killzone]

I know you can get PCI extenders like this:

http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=PCI+ex...le&ct=title

and or pci raiser cards. However, I've never seen riser cards wirth more then 4 additional slots, and they are constricting in a small/med sized case.

External PCI extenders are expensive period. If your simply trying to augment the number of PCI slots avalible to you, I think a mobo upgrade would be cheaper in the long run. But if you have the money and like the setup you are running, throw down some coinage on the above link or alike and let me know how it turns out.

I was looking into this for a while and jsut got a cheap $100 mobo with 6 pci slots, and faster bus speed, and more overclocking features then you can shake a stick at. I found it was the way to go.

[stingwray]

Make one.

[Deveant]

hmm looking at an old MB, im rather sure with sum carefuly soldering i could make one, though the cable would be a little harder to make, unless i dice up a couple of old network cards. as for the box, it wouldnt be that hard, DickSmith (radioshack) hobby box would do it.

though the materials i would need to make it are:

2X PCI device male connection

3X PCI Device female bay

1X Hobby Box

though this really would just end up being an organised PCI extension bay, i cant think of a way of actualy add more PCI ports than what ur board physicaly has.

[moonlit]

Beware latency issues and make sure you solder every joint immaculately otherwise you'll have major problems.

I don't know if this is worth doing to be honest, it's hard, time consuming, may not work and will still only give you the same amount of slots that you have now.

That's not a "don't bother, it's not gonna work", I'm all for trying things like this but be aware that it's not going to be easy and may never even work.

[Deveant]

lol waiting till i go back to work just to test this out (better to kill works equiptment instead of mine).

Though ive actualy became a lot more interested in it latly after thinging it over, ive found that if made correctly it could become useful in testing devices, sadly in my job we test a lot of PCI devices (Network, firewire, and audio cards) so i thought it would be easyer, not a nesecity but just easyer ^_^