Recently I saw this RTX 4060 Ti by ASUS with an m.2 slot, it’s a sound idea, why waste 8 lanes (by putting 8 lanes GPU in 16 lanes slot). But I’m wondering about homemade solution, I found one of those passthroughs, it should work theoretically, adding 2 additional m.2 slots to the system, obviously it won’t work in most PC cases without a pcie riser. Anyone tried that? any success? in my case (pun not intended?) my motherboard only supports 8x8x bifurcation so i could use only one m.2 device but on motherboards supporting 8x4x4x bifurcation both m.2 slots could be usable
EDIT: just got a bios update that says “Support graphics card with M.2 storage” and it gave me 8x4x4x bifurcation option, lol
yeah, i know such cards exist but the goal here is to tap those 8 lanes you loose by using x8 GPU (such as RX 6600, RX 7600, RTX 4060 etc.) in x16 slot, people could gain extra 2 m.2 ports this way, enabling compact-ish builds with lots of storage, for example i have only only one m.2 slot on my cheapo mATX board, and two additional pcie 2.0 x1 slots i have available are pretty useless storage-wise (not faster than SATA3), it would be pretty useful in my case (though i would be able to use only one additional m.2 slot because x8x8 bifurcation support)
ah my bad, I misunderstood. Yea having this would be a nice way to use those extra 8x lanes, as long as you dont plan on upgrading the card to one that needs the x16.
yeah, though at this point i’d be able to cash out for a better mobo, it’ll be still a fraction of GPU money;-) the performance difference between x8 and x16 isn’t too noticeable too, looking at the benchmarks, because GPUs don’t use that much bandwidth