Why Would You Do That?

I have an old PC tower lying around that I use as a lab/KVM hypervisor from time to time. The thing is completely headless like a server should… maybe a bit too headless actually.

The motherboard doesn’t have any video port, and the two PCIEx16 ports are used by some old OCZ Velodrives storage cards, so there is no way to plug a screen.

To a degree, it’s possible to make due with the serial port, but it gets old really fast when trying to troubleshoot pre-grub boot issues or reinstalling the OS.

The Setup

I vaguely remembered seeing some mining rigs using PCIe risers and even horror stories like dremeling some of lines off on the cards directly). So, I tried my luck with one of these adapters from Amazon.

Next to the card I had lying around (an old Nvidia GT 710), it looks like this:

With the added height, the stock bracket no longer fitted, so I designed a new one.

I started from this great collection (from an absolute chad also using FreeCAD).

From there, the design was fairly straightforward, using a photo as reference for drawing the offset cutouts.

With the new bracket, things looked like that.

And here how it looks with all the cards back in the case:

Some Closing Thoughts

It feels like it should not work, but it does!

That being said, be aware of the slot power limits. I’m not sure why (since additional PCIe lines don’t add power pins), but PCIe x1 slots can draw significantly less power than PCIe x16 slots. Consequently, I would only do it with the lowest power possible GPUs, like an Nvidia GT 710 or an AMD R5.

The cards also need to be low profile for this assembly to fit in the case.

With these caveats in place, this hack does work, however wrong it feels, and is definitely more convenient than having to open the case and juggle cards around whenever this machine is misbehaving.

In the unlikely case you are in the same boat (no video port, or some for AI setup maybe?), it’s definitely an option worth trying, as long as you are not hoping to play Crysis on the poor thing.