MP 1,1-5,1 What to do with a 20 slot expansion chassis?

[WayneStewart]

What to do with a 20 slot expansion chassis?

On my 2010 Mac Pro I have in

Slot 1 - ATI Radeon 5770 graphics card
Slot 2 - Max Express card
Slot 3 - USB 3 card
Slot 4 - card for Apple PCIe blade SSD (from 2014 Macbook Pro)

Hooked up to the Max Express card is a 20 card expansion chassis containing

A card for Apple PCIe blade SSD (from 2014 Macbook Pro)
OWC Accelsior S SATA card
USB 3.1 card
USB 3.0 card
And 15 empty slots
I have another USB 3 card I could install but I don’t especially need more than one USB 3 card
I have a couple more Apple blade SSDs I could get cards for. If I did that I could get rid of the SSDs on the Macs SATA bus

 

[zedex]

Greatest question in the world right there!!!! PCI-e expansion is the future for the cMP(!)

I have a CUBIX in slot 2 and a Netstor Turbobox in Slot 3 for the following effective config:

Slot 1 - cMP 16 lanes
Slot 2 - CUBIX XPANDER Desktop
..Slot 2,1 = PCIe 2.0 x16
..Slot 2,2 = PCIe 2.0 x16
..Slot 2,3 = PCIe 2.0 x16
..Slot 2,4 = PCIe 2.0 x16
..Slot 2,5 = PCIe 2.0 x8
..Slot 2,6 = PCIe 2.0 x8

Slot 3 - Netstor Turbobox
..Slot 3,1 = PCIe 2.0 x8
..Slot 3,2 = PCIe 2.0 x4
..Slot 3,3 = PCIe 2.0 x4

Slot 4 = PCIe 2.0 x4

so it looks like 11 slots total

Also - power support from 3 PSU.

internal = 980W
cubix = 1500W
turbobox = 280W


What's the slot config for the Max Express..?
20 x PCIe 2.0 x4 (?)

(I'll list my cards in a minute)

 

[joevt]

I got the Netstor NA255A to add PCIe 3.0 to my MacPro3,1. I'll use it to get max performance from Thunderbolt 3 add-in cards (work in progress). But I can use it to test GPUs (1200W PSU is nice - no pixlas mod necessary).
All four slots are PCIe 3.0 x8. x16 is not necessary since MacPro3,1 is limited to PCIe 2.0 x16. But x8 means I can't get max performance from PCIe 1.0 x16 or PCIe 2.0 x16 cards (mostly old GPUs which don't benefit much from the jump from x8 to x16 anyway)

 

[WayneStewart]

I bought it used about a year ago and got 1 host card and 2 expansion chassis.

Not a lot of info available online. There seem to be boards with the same name but are physically different.

It seems to be a PCIe 2.0 16x

 

[zedex]

I reckon you got this one which means you've got..
2 x8 (PCIe 2.0)
18 x4 (PCIe 2.0)

Very good for massively multiple card expansion but not great for RAW SPEED maximization because with the host card in slot 1 or 2 you can only get 3000MB/s with raided disks rather than the 6000MB/s a x16 slot can do. Still... unbeatable versatility and GPU no longer constrained by power or card width (i.e. physical dimensions)

*Max Express is a sub brand of OSS

 

[WayneStewart]

That's it. You did better than me. I found some similar ones from OSS but not this one

 

[zedex]

You should grab some cheap FUSION-IO ioScale 1.65TB PCIe SSD Add-in Cards. This will give you fully-functional Amazon Web Services-grade NVMe storage for OS X releases prior to el Capitan.

PS - let me know if you ever decide to sell it