I’m looking at quad port 2.5Gbe Intel PCIe cards. These cards seem to be mostly x4 physically (usually PCIe gen 3) whilst I have a PCIe Gen4 X1 slot, which is more the theoretical bandwidth that the card can support. The card needs at the most PCIE Gen 3 X2 == PCIE Gen 4 X1 in terms of bandwidth.
How do I fit the card into a PCIe x1 slot? Won’t it lose performance if all the pins are not connected to the physical PCIe connector? Is there a PCIe x1 riser that the community likes that is somewhat affordable?
Thanks
Then plug it in and go to town. Either it’ll work, or it won’t. Some cards get unhappy about missing pins, but it’s really just luck of the draw.
There’s another situation. There are older (and cheaper cards) which are PCIe gen 2 x8. Unfortunately, pcie gen 2 x1 is not going to suffice. What would I have to do to get this older kind of card to work? Do you have any reliable PCIe x1 to x16 risers in mind?
You also just plug it in. But again, no guarantee it’ll work. Even if you get a riser, most of them are just physical adapters. The fancier server ones do have some brain to them, but I don’t know if it would help.
You could also just sidestep the problem and use some USB adapters.
PCIe to USB and back to PCIe like what the miners use? Isn’t that unreliable long-term?
No, just a USB network adapter.
Yeah, going along these lines. There is probably a USB header on the motherboard. These have pretty darn good speeds. You can get an adapter that lets you turn those into a USB-C port and then use a standard USB-C to Ethernet adapter. Something like this or this. No guarantee on either of those specific adapters being good though. Looks like slim pickings for such things and both of those are garbage brands.
If you have a USB-C port on the back of your motherboard, you can get an adapter for that directly.
Also, motherboards generally come with 2.5Gb/s ports now too. Some even have two. Something to consider.
I think you’re missing the point of a riser. I’d the motherboard only has a 3.0x1 port, plugging in an x16 riser means it’ll still only be x1 electrically, but it can physically fit larger cards. If the back of the slot is open already there not much point of using a riser since you can physically fit larger cards already.
My board has PCIe gen 4 x1, but unfortunately there’s a really cheap card with 6 ethernet ports but PCIe gen 2 X8
You can probably use it, but you will not get full throughput on all the ports at the same time. 3.5/6 max real world.
My advice, get a cheap pcie4 10g nic and a 10g switch with multiple ports, but idk what you’re trying to do.
I’m trying to create a router + switch combo. I know bonding over CPU is considered a bad idea but I don’t want to run a proprietary OS on my switch to get VLANs. I’d rather run an OpenBSD VM and do everything in it.
This might delve into some networking, but if you can bear with me:
Whilst I like the idea of VLANs, I don’t like running proprietary firmware on my devices. Which means a regular L2+/L3 switch is not going to cut it. But I’m starting to wonder if I can just use Veths and subnetting to segregate traffic between different machines on my network?
Using your example, can I do:
PC (router) -> 10Gbe port (3 Veths) -> switch -> three different machines on different subnets?
Can I prevent the three machines from talking to each other directly through the switch if I put them in different subnets? Sorry for my lousy networking knowledge, it’s been a while.
Yeah a cheap switch probably wouldn’t cut it. You’d need a more expensive managed switch to do segregated vlans, which would balloon the budget.
Not sure on veth segregation, but you could probably try with equipment you already have (onboard nic w/ veths > unmanaged gbit switch)
I’ve been looking at the open banana pi router since it has openwrt (debian/Ubuntu too). I think I’m going to wait and hope they put more multi-gig ports on next one tho.
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