Gaming On a USB Graphics Card Adapter

While clearing out a box of old stuff I found a PCIe x1 to x16 graphics card riser. Power by a USB and Molex cable, I knew that this wouldn't exactly provide the best gaming experience but I couldn't resist testing it out.

0:00 Introduction and Setup
2:15 Cyberpunk 2077
2:52 Elden Ring
3:27 Fortnite
3:53 Forza Horizon 5
4:28 GTA IV
5:27 Red Dead Redemption 2
6:10 The Witcher 3
7:02 Final Thoughts

Thanks for watching :)

[lasskinn]

I think the usb3 is just a cable basically for connecting the pins, not doing anything 'usb'.

[zippys]

I think the title of the video is misleading. It's not a usb graphics card adapter. They are just using the usb cable to transfer the pcie x1 signal. People should not try to connect the usb to a usb port.

[shaneeslick]

G'day Random,
I love the surprises & giggles your channel gives me, it is always a better day with RGinHD videos

[mruczyslaw]

I used this adapter with Radeon RX 470 on old 2008 compaq laptop connected with additional Mini PCI-E x1 adapter, and realized that it has PCIe 1.1 and the bandwidth limitation was so terrible the performance wasn't much higher than Radeon HD5450 which I also tested. But considering that this laptop had integrated GeForce 8200M G that actually is the worst DX10-capable GPU on the planet (about 4-5x worse performance than radeon HD5450 on Mini PCI-E believe it or not) it still was a good upgrade, although very impractical.

[IIHydraII]

I wonder how much better a USB type C version would be, with their 10gb bandwidth

Edit: Yes guys I see it is still PCIE not USB, I was just curious as to whether or not the USB2.0 would have caused a bottleneck.

[MaChuKindaCrasee]

I love how utilitarian your desk set up is. There is something extremely cool about having a no frills set up.

[DaYoda]

I'd be really curious to see you test those laptop GPU adapters. There's lots to choose from, expensive ones like the razer ones, and cheap ones that are like what you have there. So I'd be really curious to see what you can do with a decent laptop and external gpu

[tex]

If you plan on buying some of these make sure you get good quality risers. Only buy risers with 6 pin power connectors and avoid the molex/ SATA risers. There have been cases where fires have been started by them.

[mariushmedias]

This has NOTHING to do with USB, the adapter just repurposes a USB cable because it has the amount of wires needed to carry the data signals of a single pci-e lane and in general such usb cables are made with good enough quality control. Could have easily been two ethernet patch cables instead of a single USB cable, it would have just looked uglier and take up more space on that tiny adapter card plugged in the pci-e x1-x16 slot.
You should edit the title of the video, I actually expected to see a USB video card (there are such cards).

[yithanong]

Very interesting. Would you consider repeating this with an older generation graphics card? Perhaps the difference would be smaller for graphics card like the GTX 1050, which, presumably would require less bandwidth on the PCIe slot anyway.

[FroggyTWrite]

these types of adapters can be a good solution for older laptops

[crisnmaryfam]

5:25 some of these are known to burst into flames for not using adequate wire gauge for the amount of power draw (hence why the thing was getting toasty).

[huzudra]

These aren't really meant for putting a graphics card in a small PC that can't hold one otherwise, these are made for GPU mining. I'm using 3 of them at the moment in a mining rig. If you need to put a graphics card in a tiny PC you'll want a 8x or 16x riser. Otherwise if you can buy these with the cables they're a cheap way to get good USB 3.0 cables if you need a bunch for some reason.

[mx]

About 5 years ago I used a PCI-E x1 riser card to diagnose a strange problem that I has with an old Asus P67 board. P67 boards don't work with the iGPU. The problem was the PCI-E x16 sized slots on the board weren't working. As a troubleshooting step I tried one of these cards in a PCI-E x1 slot and I was able to boot the system. The CPU's I used were the 2600k, 2500k, and a Pentium g645

What's strange is I tested the system with a 3770, 3570, and a 3770k and the PCI-E x16 slots work.

It makes sense that the slots that are connected to the chipset worked, and the slots that were connected to the CPU didn't. What doesn't make much sense is slots not working with Sandy Bridge but the slots worked fine with Ivy Bridge. My only guess is some of the socket pins on the board were shorted.... and IVB was using reserve pins that SB wasn't. The main performance difference between IVB and SB wasn't the CPU processing power, it was the iGPU that came with IVB was much more robust.

[Varmint]

Love these random adaptors in HD! It's got me thinking it's been near a decade since I've played GTA IV and I really need to give it another go on my modern system.

[simplygame]

Thank you for this video, I really needed this because my pcie x16 is faulty and now I can use this method, it may not be perfect but works.

[CoMmAnDrX]

Not USB, just using the USB cable as the connecting interface between the two cards.

[Ammageddon]

Yes, the molex adapter is VERY capable of catching fire. Or at least in my case it got so hot that it melted the cables isolation....

[Frittentheo]

Can you make a second test with the adapter in the upper pcie slot which is connected to the cpu? In the lower slot you have performance drops because these are supported by the chipset. So you measured not only the differences between pcie 4.0 x1 and pcie 3.0 x1. If you want, you can limit the pcie version of the upper slot down to 3.0 for the mesurements in the UEFI.

[CMDRSweeper]

Okay, here is another scenario that would totally validate this adapter.
SAS expanders in servers, these are cards you attach to SAS controllers to have more harddrives (SAS is compatible with SATA), but these cards are usually PCI-E 8x in length.
Now these expanders are unique in the sense that they do not use the PCI-E bus for anything other than power, all communication is done over a SAS cable from your SAS controller.
So this adapter you have will basically allow these cards to get their power without eating up a PCI-E slot on your motherboard.