Customer Reviews

StarTech.com Pci-exp X1 To Low Profile X16 Slot Extension Adapter

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Item advertised as able to convert PCI cards to PCI Express cards.
But NOT all PCI cards fit the slots available in this card.
The specs for this card should be more specific.

HOWEVER - there was no problem in returning the product and receiving full credit.

I ran into a problem when upgrading the motherboard on my home-theater PC where one of the PCI-e tuner cards ran right into the installed RAM; so it wouldn't install correctly. What I needed was a product that would raise the tuner card just a bit more off of the motherboard - and this product seemed to fit the bill perfectly.

Although this product worked great for me, here are some things that could be improved:
1) This adapter isn't the right height for a low-profile PCI-e card to fit in it. I was planning on installing a low-profile bracket on the tuner card; but this adapter is about 1/4" too short for that to work properly. Instead, I kept the full sized bracket on the tuner and tied it into the case using a zip-tie. (That works, but it isn't optimal.)
2) Although the 16-lane (x16) extension works fine, I really only needed a 1-lane riser card for my purposes. A 4 or 8-lane extension would have also worked fine and I would have prefered those options if they had been available.

I can't believe that some people are using this to install a 16-lane video card in a 1-lane slot. Just in case it isn't clear, that means you are losing a huge portion of the bandwidth potential of the video card. With PCI-e 2.0, for example, you get 500MB/s for each lane - which means that a 16-lane card can have a total throughput of 8GB/s. By installing your video card in this adapter, you are essentially crippling the performance. That's fine if you really know what you are doing - I just want to be clear that this isn't just an extension that will give you the same performance as a native slot. I also suspect that some x16 cards probably won't work at all when cut down to x1.

Overall, I would recommend this extension if you know what you need. The height of the riser is the biggest downside and I hope that gets corrected for other users in a new revision.

The price was good but the product did not help at all in my system. I was unable to insert the graphics card I bought the extension card for, completely in my system. If you have bought the wrong graphics card I would suggest returning it and buying the right graphics card before buying this product. This extension card made the graphics card stick out about an inch from where it needed to be. It may or may not work in your system. Although using it and attaching the graphics card onto it was easy, I would not suggest buying this product.

I had to modify my box to get this to fit with a graphics card plugged into it. It sits above the slot about an inch which moves your card out about an inch as well.

It works great and saved me from having to buy another type of graphics card.

Great product at a decent price. I needed this piece to install a Graphics card and found the best price on Amazon. Easy as pie to install too.

Inserting a video card into this adapter and then trying to fit it into the computer does not work, period.