Due to the backwards orientation of the motherboard in the Monsterlabo The Beast case...

[AudioDoctor]

I am unable to mount a PCIe card in the PCIe slots due to the fact that there is not enough clearance between the motherboard face and the massive heatsink. For the GPU, Monsterlabo provides a PCIe riser cable long enough to connect to the GPU on the opposite side and on its own massive heatsink. What I want to do is put a Jcat Netcard XE in this thing however I am having trouble finding an appropriate PCIe riser cable with enough length or apparent quality to accomplish this.

Is anyone here aware of such a thing of good quality? I estimate it would need to be approximately a foot long to be able to work in any of the possible positions inside the case where it can be mounted.

 

edit: approximately .30 of a meter for those of you who use a common sense system of measurement.

[MarcelNL]

30cm is long, I have foraged into risers a bit when playing with a NUC and found that ADT makes decent ones, but DO check which one you need as the selection is HUGE. Probably straight PCIe to PCIe is simple enough, I was looking for a M.2 but struggled to find the right key.

 

There is a security warning as the site is crappy/old; http://www.adt.link/product/R3335W.html

[AudioDoctor]

4 hours ago, MarcelNL said:

30cm is long, I have foraged into risers a bit when playing with a NUC and found that ADT makes decent ones, but DO check which one you need as the selection is HUGE. Probably straight PCIe to PCIe is simple enough, I was looking for a M.2 but struggled to find the right key.

 

There is a security warning as the site is crappy/old; http://www.adt.link/product/R3335W.html

 

This is exactly what I was looking for, thank you.

[di-fi]

 

From the ADT website: EMI Shielding with Conducting Polymer
With metal shield. The extender utilizes the latest materials for EMI shielding with five sole flat cables design. This technique allows each cable to be fully covered by electromagnetic interference shielding with conducting polymer to guard against incoming or outgoing emissions of electromagnetic frequencies, minimize disturbance and degradation on performance, and reduce the weight of the extender.

 

adapter/riser/extension cables

 

https://www.amazon.ca/s?k=ADT-LINK&ref=bl_dp_s_web_0

 

thanks/bedankt!  @MarcelNL
 

amazon.ca seems to have more in stock than amazon.com

amazon.de seems to sell under cablecc brand (not 100% sure)

[MarcelNL]

I ended up ordering direct from ADT-link, which was pretty slow... but the part I needed was not in stock anywhere. The more mundane versions should be easy to find.

[AudioDoctor]

38 minutes ago, di-fi said:

 

From the ADT website: EMI Shielding with Conducting Polymer
With metal shield. The extender utilizes the latest materials for EMI shielding with five sole flat cables design. This technique allows each cable to be fully covered by electromagnetic interference shielding with conducting polymer to guard against incoming or outgoing emissions of electromagnetic frequencies, minimize disturbance and degradation on performance, and reduce the weight of the extender.

 

adapter/riser/extension cables

 

https://www.amazon.ca/s?k=ADT-LINK&ref=bl_dp_s_web_0

 

thanks/bedankt!  @MarcelNL
 

amazon.ca seems to have more in stock than amazon.com

amazon.de seems to sell under cablecc brand (not 100% sure)

 

At the link that @MarcelNL provided, I also saw that the cable is very bendable which is good because the cable also needs to twist due to the motherboard facing the "wrong" way and mounted horizontally, on the heatsink.

[MarcelNL]

Out of the 4 or 5 risers I tried I liked the build quality of this one best by far, some looked and feeled as if they were made for a few cents (and they likely were)

[MarcelNL]

I imagine that if you are still using SATA this cable would work nicely for a SATA link, far better is NVME though...no cable and you get to lessen teh burden on the chipset by switching SATA off in BIOS,

[AudioDoctor]

2 hours ago, MarcelNL said:

I imagine that if you are still using SATA this cable would work nicely for a SATA link, far better is NVME though...no cable and you get to lessen teh burden on the chipset by switching SATA off in BIOS,

 

The Jcat card is PCIe, and I need SATA for the SSDs that hold the local music files.

[di-fi]

If you prefer to avoid SATA but access your music on SSD, and you have an open pcie slot available, I wonder if this adapter could work. Some will even accommodate 2 SSD drives. 
 

 

[MarcelNL]

If your MoBo can accomodate NVME simply buy a small cheap one and do a test run comparing SATA to NVME. 

SSD via SATA is nice, SSD on PCIe is better, NVME is best (and then you get in the territory of which NVME.

 

[AudioDoctor]

14 hours ago, MarcelNL said:

If your MoBo can accomodate NVME simply buy a small cheap one and do a test run comparing SATA to NVME. 

SSD via SATA is nice, SSD on PCIe is better, NVME is best (and then you get in the territory of which NVME.

 

 

I am not looking to add more disk space guys...

[MarcelNL]

2 minutes ago, AudioDoctor said:

 

I am not looking to add more disk space guys...

This is not about more, but about better sounding disk space!

[AudioDoctor]

Well, I have no open PCIe slots because of the orientation of the motherboard and the heat sink.

[MarcelNL]

3 hours ago, AudioDoctor said:

Well, I have no open PCIe slots because of the orientation of the motherboard and the heat sink.

that sucks...but NVME sits on the MoBo, yet not all MoBo have these slots.

[AudioDoctor]

17 minutes ago, MarcelNL said:

that sucks...but NVME sits on the MoBo, yet not all MoBo have these slots.

 

haha. I know the NVME is on the motherboard... So you're saying if I put my music on this, it would sound better than the SSDs it's on now?

https://www.amazon.com/SABRENT-Internal-Extreme-Performance-SB-RKT4P-8TB/dp/B09WZK8YMY?th=1

[MarcelNL]

indeed, and the funny thing is, putting your OS on one of them does your SQ good too!

Don's me to explain but SSD sounds better than a regular hard drive, an externally powered SSD (easy to cobble together) on a LPS sounds better than SSD, NVME SSD sounds better than the previous step, and the femto NVME SSD with external LPS sounds best (but is expensive)

Many MoBo have two or three NVME slots, get a small one for the OS and a larger one for the music, or two smaller ones to test fly this solution.

 

 

[AudioDoctor]

I only have 2 NVME slots and my OS lives on the first one. Ubuntu Server 20.04. 8TB will cover my music right now, and for the short term future, but I am on a buying spree and most of it is high res and DSD, which takes up a lot of space pretty quickly. My thinking when I set this up is replacing 2.5 inch SSDs would be easier and cheaper than hoping a larger NVME drive came out in time.

 

My motherboard is an ASUS ProArt X570 with a 5900X on it.

 

edit: never mind, it apparently does have three M.2 spaces on it.

[MarcelNL]

yeah storage space is just like horsepower in a car, never enough :-)

I count my blessings that most material I play is red book, or comes in via Qobuz. (My DAC is a NOS R2R which is allergic to DSD anyway)

 

What I plan on doing when I run out of space is that I put a 'working collection'on the NVME in the server and store the rest elsewhere, probably on a good old external USB hard drive so I can pull files over the fiber network when I need them.

[AudioDoctor]

6 minutes ago, MarcelNL said:

yeah storage space is just like horsepower in a car, never enough :-)

I count my blessings that most material I play is red book, or comes in via Qobuz. (My DAC is a NOS R2R which is allergic to DSD anyway)

 

What I plan on doing when I run out of space is that I put a 'working collection'on the NVME in the server and store the rest elsewhere, probably on a good old external USB hard drive so I can pull files over the fiber network when I need them.

 

Ha, storage space is exactly like that.

 

I read through the user manual of my Mobo just now and I think I have it figured out. All 3 M.2 slots will run at PCIe-4 speeds IF I am not using the second PCIe-4 x16 slot. Which I am not. Currently just the first which connects to the GPU through the provided riser cable. The JCAT card would connect to the 3rd PCIe-4 x16 slot, which has it's own bandwidth and will run at x4 speeds anyway. I think it will also disable two of the 6 SATA ports, but I am not using those anyway if I do this, nor am I now.

 

 

[MarcelNL]

That should give you a nice improvement, latency is much lower for the NVME discs and disabling SATA also does something nice!