It works fine on most motherboards. The bundled MCIO cables are 75 cm long and manufactured by 3M. The cable quality is excellent. The vendor states that these two cables meet the signal specifications for PCIe 6.0. Unless the motherboard itself has poor signal integrity, in which case they recommend using it with a retimer card.
New Chinese PCIE Switch Board GPU Testing
- Thread starter TrashMaster
- Start date
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@Bad Apple do you know if the previous PCIE4 gen switches also have this MCU? Or just the newer 89xx?
Are you referring to UTRAN's 4.0 product? Sure, basically all of their products incorporate an MCU for basic management functions. The Chinese PEX88096 expansion board mentioned in the title does not come with an MCU; it is a simple PCIe switch.
Greetings experts! I picked up one of these ebay switches and I'm having trouble getting it to power on. I'm not sure if anybody on this thread has the exact same one I do but I see a lot of expertise on here that I lack, so I'm hoping somebody can see where I'm going wrong.
Here's the switch and the slimSAS adapter card that came with it: https://www.ebay.com/itm/147563772021
I have an nzxt n9 z890 motherboard and an intel ultra 9 285k cpu. I'm using a ThermalTake ToughPower GF3 1650 as a second external PSU to power the switch card and the GPUs.
My switch only has two 6-pin power connectors on it marked "GPU_PWR". I connected these to the PSU using 8-pin to 6+2 pin cables. One of the cables is a daisy-chain cable but I'm not using the second plug, if that matters. (See pictures)
I'll include my first (failed) attempt farther down for background. My current (also failing) attempt is hopefully better focused:
I've jumpered my external PSU and it starts just fine when nothing is connected to it. When I connect the bare switch to it (no slimSAS, no GPU), the green light on the board flashes for a split second and then everything shuts down. Some kind of fault protection but I don't have any more info. Claude had me try connecting one plug at a time to see if there was a short circuit in one of them and it made no difference. Immediate shut-down on either plug.
So, is there some reason for this other than a hardware problem? PEBKAC? ID 10 T? Do I need to have the slimSAS cables connected? At least one card installed? Does anybody have this same card working correctly? I'm an experienced developer, but my pc-building experience is limited to upgrading RAM and drives.
Here's a description of my first attempt for completeness: I hooked up everything I thought I needed: the adapter, the slimSAS cables, the PSU, the switch, and the evga 3090 ftw3 ultra that had been installed and working in slot 1 of the mobo. I hadn't jumpered the PSU (didn't know about that yet!), so the switch failed to power on and the mobo boot-looped. I did a lot of back-and-forth experimenting with Claude and Gemini mostly isolating the adapter card. The upshot was that the machine would boot with the adapter card in the second slot, which is a PCIe 4x16 slot that's connected to the mobo chipset, but not the first slot, which is a PCIe 5x16 slot connected to the CPU, even when that slot was bios-limited to PCIe 4. Claude/Gemini think that the CPU won't tolerate an unresponsive card in its directly connected slot, but the mobo is more forgiving. The answer to that issue would be to have the switch powered on and connected at the other end, but that brings me back to my current problems - I can't get the switch to power on!
Any insights would be greatly appreciated. I've reached out to the ebay seller but responses are painfully slow due to time zone differences. I can get about 1 response/day.
Here's the switch and the slimSAS adapter card that came with it: https://www.ebay.com/itm/147563772021
I have an nzxt n9 z890 motherboard and an intel ultra 9 285k cpu. I'm using a ThermalTake ToughPower GF3 1650 as a second external PSU to power the switch card and the GPUs.
My switch only has two 6-pin power connectors on it marked "GPU_PWR". I connected these to the PSU using 8-pin to 6+2 pin cables. One of the cables is a daisy-chain cable but I'm not using the second plug, if that matters. (See pictures)
I'll include my first (failed) attempt farther down for background. My current (also failing) attempt is hopefully better focused:
I've jumpered my external PSU and it starts just fine when nothing is connected to it. When I connect the bare switch to it (no slimSAS, no GPU), the green light on the board flashes for a split second and then everything shuts down. Some kind of fault protection but I don't have any more info. Claude had me try connecting one plug at a time to see if there was a short circuit in one of them and it made no difference. Immediate shut-down on either plug.
So, is there some reason for this other than a hardware problem? PEBKAC? ID 10 T? Do I need to have the slimSAS cables connected? At least one card installed? Does anybody have this same card working correctly? I'm an experienced developer, but my pc-building experience is limited to upgrading RAM and drives.
Here's a description of my first attempt for completeness: I hooked up everything I thought I needed: the adapter, the slimSAS cables, the PSU, the switch, and the evga 3090 ftw3 ultra that had been installed and working in slot 1 of the mobo. I hadn't jumpered the PSU (didn't know about that yet!), so the switch failed to power on and the mobo boot-looped. I did a lot of back-and-forth experimenting with Claude and Gemini mostly isolating the adapter card. The upshot was that the machine would boot with the adapter card in the second slot, which is a PCIe 4x16 slot that's connected to the mobo chipset, but not the first slot, which is a PCIe 5x16 slot connected to the CPU, even when that slot was bios-limited to PCIe 4. Claude/Gemini think that the CPU won't tolerate an unresponsive card in its directly connected slot, but the mobo is more forgiving. The answer to that issue would be to have the switch powered on and connected at the other end, but that brings me back to my current problems - I can't get the switch to power on!
Any insights would be greatly appreciated. I've reached out to the ebay seller but responses are painfully slow due to time zone differences. I can get about 1 response/day.
Buy an add2psu relay off amazon. that pcie switch board doesnt have the atx connector u need for it to manage ur second PSU on/off. run a pcie connection from PSU1 to the add2psu device, then plug the atx cable from PSU2 into the add2psu device. both psu should power on and off together. Do NOT cross any power cables between your PC that has motherboard, fans, cpu pcie gpu etc. plugged in to anything attached to the pcie switch board or its GPUs. Maintain strict separation of power planes and only use the relays to simultaneously activate them. Hope u didnt cook anything and the psu protection kicked in fast
all my PSUs are standard ATX seasonic 1600w prime. I have buckets of standard seasonic cables for them but occasionally buy custom length ones from the moddiy guyZ
I have since upgraded to far more advanced chassis with their own 15000w power distribution boards and 5x CRPS inputs but thats not what i have used with desktop hardware or pcie switches. Those are special chassis specific things.
I have since upgraded to far more advanced chassis with their own 15000w power distribution boards and 5x CRPS inputs but thats not what i have used with desktop hardware or pcie switches. Those are special chassis specific things.
Wow, thanks for all the quick replies! To answer some questions:
egn:
- My PSU is a ThermalTake ToughPower GF3 1650, it's new.
- All the cables that I'm using came with the PSU.
TrashMaster:
I'll give the add2psu doodad a try. I was hoping to avoid the need for it by having the jumper. I've been careful about maintaining separate power planes as you say. Question for you: It sounds like you're saying that the switch and the PC need to come up simulaneously? Not switch first, then PC. Is that because the switch needs something on the other end of the slimSAS connection? If you read my first attempt account in my first message, Claude thought something similar, just in the other direction. It suggested that the PC was failing to boot because it thought my slimSAS adapter was a defective device. I'd love to hear your thoughts, I'm just trying to learn as much as I can as I go
Thanks again! I'm pretty excited about this direction and I'm dying to get this started.
egn:
- My PSU is a ThermalTake ToughPower GF3 1650, it's new.
- All the cables that I'm using came with the PSU.
TrashMaster:
I'll give the add2psu doodad a try. I was hoping to avoid the need for it by having the jumper. I've been careful about maintaining separate power planes as you say. Question for you: It sounds like you're saying that the switch and the PC need to come up simulaneously? Not switch first, then PC. Is that because the switch needs something on the other end of the slimSAS connection? If you read my first attempt account in my first message, Claude thought something similar, just in the other direction. It suggested that the PC was failing to boot because it thought my slimSAS adapter was a defective device. I'd love to hear your thoughts, I'm just trying to learn as much as I can as I go
Thanks again! I'm pretty excited about this direction and I'm dying to get this started.
They should come up together, at the same time. A half-alive thing on one side is going to piss off the other side trying to shake hands with it.
Thats why on big chassis systems the BMC comes alive first, sees the system board and power distribution board via pmbus, the pcie switches via smbus, etc. before sending power to the CPUs in one big orchestrated dance. Being your own systems integrator is a learning opportunity to be sure and debugging without that central out of band manager watching it all happen and recording events/problems is doubly difficult. another reason why after a dozen GPUs i gave up on trying to stitch together the parts on my own and just paid the shenzen metal folding tax lol
also before u get too deep in it, take a bunch of high resolution pictures and drop them on imgur of all the connectors ports silkscreening etc on that board, high res pics of this stuff are hard to come by.
Thats why on big chassis systems the BMC comes alive first, sees the system board and power distribution board via pmbus, the pcie switches via smbus, etc. before sending power to the CPUs in one big orchestrated dance. Being your own systems integrator is a learning opportunity to be sure and debugging without that central out of band manager watching it all happen and recording events/problems is doubly difficult. another reason why after a dozen GPUs i gave up on trying to stitch together the parts on my own and just paid the shenzen metal folding tax lol
also before u get too deep in it, take a bunch of high resolution pictures and drop them on imgur of all the connectors ports silkscreening etc on that board, high res pics of this stuff are hard to come by.