PCI Expansion plans?

[Illya Laney]

Audio professionals have been using PCI/PCIe chassis for years because of the lack of slots. I don’t know if the trend started with using multiple DSPs in ProTools, but that’s when I first encountered it almost 6 years ago when I was building ProTools HD systems.

Many cards don’t make full use of a slot’s bandwidth anyway and that’s why you can run 2GPU cards on a 16x bus.

twitter.com/illyalaney
Motion Design, Color, Editing
SWGC Incorporated

[Sandust]

I have the Cyclone 600-2707 PCIe expander and it is great.
https://www.cyclone.com/products/expansion_systems/600-2707.php

Uses one 16x v2 PCIe slot and provides three 16x v2 slots and two 8x v2 slots. If you set it up right you can fill it with cards and not use more than the 16 v2 lanes of bandwidth it has with the host system.

I haven’t used it with Resolve yet, but it seems like it will be perfect.

So far the only problem I have had is with the Atto R60F raid card. Seems like none of the ATTO 6G cards work with it, but the 3G cards do.

I have mine in a different enclosure with 10 drive trays and an LTO4.

For Resolve with the Cyclone, I would consider this config:

Mac Pro
Slot 1: GPU (GTX285)
Slot 2: Cyclone
Slot 3: Blackmagic (its only a 4x card)
Slot 4:

Cyclone
Slot 1: Atto Raid (x8 v1 card, only 3G cards work right now)
Slot 2: Red Rocket (x8 v1 card)
Slot 3: Secondary Video card for display
Slot 4:
Slot 5:

And that leaves room for three more cards. Plus the enclosure for the Cyclone can be set up to hold several drives to connect internally to your Atto raid card. And all your cards are getting their full bandwidth.

Dusty

Mahalo,
Dusty

http://www.sandust.com
Red One #973

[Graham Jones]

Hi,

how about this one– very low cost, adds 2 PCIe and 2 PCI:
https://ca.startech.com/product/PEX2PCIE4L-PCI-Express-to-2-PCI-Full-Length-2-PCIe-Single-lane-Expansion-Box

$600 is a steal!

Hope this helps,
Gray.