Soldered Celeron Boards, with 4 in 1 USB risers

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onsit

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Jan 5, 2018
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Inspired by Klee's fancy long board, I went looking at brand name motherboards with soldered Celerons.

And stumbled on an interesting arrangement.




$80 for a mobo, $25 for the 4 in1 adapter. Searching on the forums seems you can comfortably run 4 VEGAs off this 4 in 1 PCI adapter. Obviously you still need your traditional risers and a way to power them.

Which makes me wonder. Why bother spending ~150 on a cookie cutter ASUS PRIME Z270-A, and ~50 on a G4400 celeron, plus the cost of DDR4.

In hindsight, I wish I went this route and stuffed it into my 4U case. Possibly maybe found a mini-itx board with 2 pci-e. To use 2 of those 4in1 expanders.
 
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vudu

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Nice. Wish I had thought of this. Have used them in the past to provide USB3 to older machines. From memory they had there own power connector. Molex maybe.
 

onsit

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Seems there are a few chinese boards you can order soldred celeron, and that have USB 3.0 slots that are wired to the PCI-e bus.
 

marcoi

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anyone know if you can run the 4 in 1 card in multiple slots? IE if my MB has two slots can i get two cards and run 8 video cards?
 

jims2321

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anyone know if you can run the 4 in 1 card in multiple slots? IE if my MB has two slots can i get two cards and run 8 video cards?
I am not 100% sure, but it should be possible. After all its not like you sending anything more than data results across the 1x connection.
 

onsit

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anyone know if you can run the 4 in 1 card in multiple slots? IE if my MB has two slots can i get two cards and run 8 video cards?
They make breakout boards that do 8 USB 3.0 -> PCIe 1x. But they are a bit more expensive. I think at some point they need to be powered for more than 4 ports.

 

Patrick

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@onsit - that one you just posted has a PLX PCIe switch so it is PCIe -> USB 3.

The one pictured a few posts above does not look like it has a switch chip.
 

onsit

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@onsit - that one you just posted has a PLX PCIe switch so it is PCIe -> USB 3.

The one pictured a few posts above does not look like it has a switch chip.
Yeah after comparing the PCBs there is a major lack of components. The 4 port one is legit, and the last one I added that is 8 ports seems legit too. The 6 port one looks like a scam chinese posting as it was labeled Mining Board.

Overall this would make for a good cheap 4 GPU build if you matched it with a 750 Watt HP Gold psu, breakout board, PICO 160w PSU, and RX 550. ~2,000 hashing power for a decent budget if you already have the HP PSU, and PICOs.
 
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Klee

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You have to be careful, the usb connections for miner risers are just to carry the data to and from the gpu via pci-e and are NOT usb. They use usb parts because they are cheap and work and are used to carry pci-e data not usb data.

If you plug a usb cable from a mining riser to a real usb port it will not work and will damage hardware.
 
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onsit

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You have to be careful, the usb connections for miner risers are just to carry the data to and from the gpu via pci-e and are NOT usb. They use usb parts because they are cheap and work and are used to carry pci-e data not usb data.

If you plug a usb cable from a mining riser to a real usb port it will not work and will damage hardware.
Yeah i'm going to stick to Mintcell, they are probably the most well known seller of riser's on Amazon. Their 4 port pci-e riser card is probably the safest bet.
 
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vudu

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Yeah i'm going to stick to Mintcell, they are probably the most well known seller of riser's on Amazon. Their 4 port pci-e riser card is probably the safest bet.
Do you have a link? Thanks