runnin a pci card outside the box?

[daArry]

is it wise? can it be done? i imagined it'd involve some kinda pci slot to dtype adaptor, then just run from the pci card edge to another dtype (in the breakout box) and connect the 2...minus the psu lines which would be powered external too...

Idea here was to use my rme card which has 3x adat i/o in an adda box so I dont have to mess about with annoying pingy bendy adat cables...

thoughts -as always- appreciated :thumb:

 

[daArry]

ye, this is what i thought :/

i guess heatshrinking the adat cables together would be a start to clean up cable runs...

 

[Svart]

yeah the cable length is a large problem. I actually did this to a MB once.. i took the AGP and PCI slots off of the MB and ran ribbon cable between them. oh boy did this really suck. all kinds of crashes and errors. the cable was only about 2" too. I put the sockets back and no problems.

:thumb:

 

[Gus]

A little off topic but maybe helpful

The last extender card I used for troubleshooting was a ISA one, this was years ago when one would fix/try to fix PC cards.

PCB for PCs amaze me. Light travels about 1 foot in a nano second slower in Cu. On the new boards there are 33mhz signals going to the PCI, 66 Mhz to the AGP. Some of the other busses are over 200Mhz.

When you do the math, the lengths of the traces have to be the electrical correct length so all the lines have less of a settling time to good data etc...........................WOW, the seperate layers, crosstalk. I think I read electrons can bunchup in corners if the coners are square. It seem every thing counts in PC PCB design. All that work and you can buy a good board at about $100.00 !

 

[volta]

is it wise? can it be done? i imagined it'd involve some kinda pci slot to dtype adaptor

Is this what you're looking for?

http://www.mobl.com/expansion/pci/index.html
They have several options.

 

[Gus]

That is a cool link. I wonder if there are bridge chips being made for PCI to PC express.

PCexpress is serial maybe a PCI to PCe, cable to outside box to PCE then PCI?

 

[PRR]

> can it be done?

No, not as simple as extending the wires. On ISA, you could splice a foot into the bus, but all the PCI cards on one bridge-chip have to be within an inch or two of eachother, the bridge-chip, and the bus terminations.

A bus is the same as a sewer-pipe. You can talk inside a short sewer pipe. In a long sewer pipe, the echos mangle your speech. At the speed that PCI talks, "long" is a couple inches.

Outfits like the one Volta points to have found ways to extend the bus. Basically by converting PCI-talk into a non-bus protocol, extending that, and then converting back to PCI with a PCI bridge-chip. They are not cheap, and may be clever enough to be patented.

There are good reasons to go that way, but wrestling an ADAT cable may be less trouble than these solutions.

 

[daArry]

Once again an easy to understand n informative analegy - cheers PRR!

Yup, those magma boxes I've seen before - a matey uses em with some c/w pulsar cards with his laptop - all good as I understand...

I'm settled for just heatshrinkin the cables now...:thumb: