ANTONY LEATHER’S
Customised PC
Case mods, tools, techniques, water-cooling gear
and everything to do with PC modding
MODDING / OPINION
I
’ve mentioned in my column
before about the pitfalls of
using a PCI-E 3 riser cable
when both your motherboard and GPU
support PCI-E 4. With both devices
trying to communicate in PCI-E 4
mode, your system will go haywire
when you use a PCI-E 3 riser cable. In
fact, a couple of graphics cards I’ve
tested recently, such as Palit’s Game
Rock RTX 3090, refused to output a
display at all when used with a PCI-E 3
riser cable.
The only option in both cases is to
force your PCI-E graphics slot back to
Gen 3 in the BIOS. However, in the case
of the RTX 3090 I was testing at the
time, it wouldn’t even let me do that – I
had to use another GPU to get into the
BIOS, as the Ryzen system I was using
didn’t have an on-board GPU. It’s all a
bit of a mess and it’s caught out plenty
of people, including me.
We’ll have to live with this situation
for the time being, but I’ve thankfully
also heard from three companies
this year that are working on theirown PCI-E 4 riser cables. At the very
least, we should be able to buy some
PCI-E 4 options soon, although it may
be a while until we see them being
provided with PC cases.
Firstly, there’s EK; alongside some
very interesting water-cooling gear,the company told me during its CES
online expo that it’s working on its
own cable. CableMod, which we’ve
previously recommended in Custom
PC for its excellent custom power
supply cable design service, is also
working on its own range of PCI-E 4PCI-E 4 riser cables are inbound
PCI-E riser cables
included with
current PC cases
are only compatible
with PCI-E 3, but
PCI-E 4 models
are coming