Hey All! so I got a weird-ish question for everyone. Little back story, my chassis is starting to run out of physical space for HDD's (10 out of 12 slots full) I currently have an 9207-8i sas card (with some additional drives connected to my motherborad sata ports., I'm thinking of getting a 9305-16i card and a hard drive shelf that connects via sas cable so I can expand an additional 16 cards with a Nimble ES1. I mainly use Unraid for my Plex media server.

 

Now for the odd question. My motherboard has (1) PCIe 5 x16 (x16 mode) PCIe slot through the CPU and (1) PCIe4 x16  slot (x4 mode) along with (2) x1 PCIe slots that are through the chipset. I currently have a Intel ARC A750 for transcoding in my x16 slot. The LSI 9305-16i is an x8 card, I don't want to lose a lot of drive speed by running that at x4. SO, would I lose an INSANE amount of transocoding power if I put my ARC A750 in the x4 slot and ran the LSI 9305-16i in the x16 slot (which I assume would just drop down to x8). I know my setup is not ideal for what I'm trying to do, but I didn't really think this far ahead when I built my server - first one I've built and didn't know half this stuff existed when I built it haha. Not really trying to get a new motherboard with 2 x16/x8 slots at the moment.

 

I don't transcode much, 95% of the time its direct play, but I like having the capability of transcoding through my GPU. Let me know what you guys think! Thanks!

 

** Hardware is as follows **

ASRock Z790 Pro RS/D4 Motherboard

Intel I5 12600k

16GB DDR4 Ram

 

Edited May 12, 20251 yr by lxr200

11 minutes ago, lxr200 said:

SO, would I lose an INSANE amount of transocoding power if I put my ARC A750 in the x4 slot and ran the LSI 9305-16i in the x16 slot (which I assume would just drop down to x8). 

 

No, the amount of lanes are only important for feeding the GPU/vram with lots and lots of data quickly. Transcoding basically needs nothing in that regard. If you run something like games (although it doesn't matter there in the most cases either) or LLM, that would matter

2 minutes ago, Mainfrezzer said:

No, the amount of lanes are only important for feeding the GPU/vram with lots and lots of data quickly. Transcoding basically needs nothing in that regard. If you run something like games (although it doesn't matter there in the most cases either) or LLM, that would matter

Ok so in my situation it sounds like this would be a solid plan and "SHOULD" work out well? Move GPU to x4 mode slot, put the SAS controller in the x16 mode slot, and send it lol. - well when I end up getting the new hardware that is.

Yeah, absolutely 

 

2 minutes ago, Mainfrezzer said:

Yeah, absolutely 

 

sweet, I might be picking up that drive shelf this upcoming weekend, not sure when I'll get everything hooked up, but I'll try to give an update when I get everything situated. Thanks for the assist!