Fitting PCIE X4 card in PCIE X1 Slot

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mda

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Hi All,

Looking to add some Intel NICs to an X570 without an Intel LAN. (Don't want to hack a realtek driver in for ESXI work)

The X570 TUF does not come with an X4 slot and I'm not sure if I'll be using the second PCIE X16 slot for something else.

I have lying around a few I340-T4s, which are 4 port, PCIE 2.0 x4 cards.

Based on some research, PCIE 2.0 X1 will easily handle the bandwidth needed for 4 LAN connections (500MB/s per 2.0 lane). I do not intend to use all of them though, but there's that.

a. Will something like a riser card work so I can get an "x4/x8" slot from the X1 slot? If yes, which ones are reliable?
b. Will there be power delivery problems with this?

Thanks!
 
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It should work. Depending on how accessible the slot it, you should be able to simply snip the rear plastic of the 1x slot open on the motherboard and it should accept the 4x card directly at that point (as long as nothing else on the motherboard is in the way). Alternatively, you could actually cut part of the connector off the card to make it fit.

I'm not sure about risers for this purpose, but I did use a PCIe ribbon-cable extension once to take advantage of a slot that was covered by the heatsink of my GPU. Worked great.
 
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Thanks. Will look into it.

The X570 TUF is currently on sale at about 165$, and I may need another machine for this purpose so I'm studying the possibility. If I'm going to spend more money to add in the Intel LAN, I may as well spend the extra funds to buy a board WITH intel LAN.
 
The second PCIe16 slot is an electrical x4 slot wired to the chipset.

In theory, both x1 and x4 should support up to 25W (x16 slots support a bit more).
 
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