I Bought a $6 PCIe x16 Riser Cable For GAMING.... Was it a MISTAKE

**A Budget-Friendly Solution: Cheap PCI Riser Cables**

In today's world of PC hardware, finding affordable solutions can be a challenge. One such solution is the cheap PCI riser cable. These cables are designed to connect graphics cards to motherboards and provide a convenient way to upgrade or add new graphics cards to an existing system.

The author of this article recently had the opportunity to test out some cheap PCI riser cables and was pleased with the results. The cables were affordable, easy to install, and did the job without any issues. In fact, the author notes that they are a great value option for those looking to upgrade or add new graphics cards to their system.

For example, if you're building a low-budget PC, these riser cables can be a great addition to your system. They allow you to connect a high-end graphics card to your motherboard without having to purchase an expensive PCI Express (PCIe) expansion card. This can be especially useful for those looking to add a powerful graphics card to their system without breaking the bank.

However, it's worth noting that these riser cables may not be suitable for all systems or applications. For example, if you're running a high-end graphics card like an RX 6000 series or an RTX 3000 series, you may want to consider purchasing a PCIe 4.0 expansion card instead. These cards offer faster speeds and more features than the cheap riser cables.

In contrast, for those building a low-budget PC with a less powerful graphics card, these riser cables can be a great option. The author notes that they have tested them with NVIDIA GeForce 980 Ti and AMD Radeon HD 970, and they work well in these applications.

**Testing the Cheap PCI Riser Cables**

The author of this article recently put several cheap PCI riser cables through their paces to test their performance and reliability. They were pleased with the results, noting that the cables worked as expected without any issues.

However, it's worth noting that the author did experience some problems in the past with other riser cables. They mention that certain cables caused boot issues or would glitch out, causing their system to crash. This highlights the importance of choosing a high-quality PCI riser cable from a reputable manufacturer.

In contrast, the cheap PCI riser cables tested by the author performed flawlessly, providing reliable and stable connections for their graphics cards.

**Comparison to Other CPUs**

One question that was recently posed on the channel's social media platform was how this cheap PCI riser cable compares to the author's old workhorse CPU, the 1680 V3. The author responded by sharing their thoughts on the comparison.

The author notes that while the 1680 V3 is an excellent CPU, it may not be the best option for every user or application. They mention that the CPU has a limited number of cores and threads, which can make it less suitable for applications that require high performance or multiple threads.

In contrast, the cheap PCI riser cable is designed to provide fast and reliable connections for graphics cards, rather than competing with CPUs in terms of raw processing power. The author notes that they have used this cable in their own video editing workloads and were pleased with the results.

**The 1680 V3: A Workhorse CPU**

For those interested in learning more about the 1680 V3, the author mentions that it was a popular choice for video editing and content creation in the past. They note that the CPU's 8 cores and 16 threads made it well-suited for tasks like video editing and color correction.

However, as time went on, the author found that their workload became increasingly demanding, requiring more processing power to complete. In response, they upgraded to a newer and faster CPU, which provided improved performance and responsiveness.

The author notes that while the 1680 V3 was an excellent choice for its time, it may not be the best option for every user or application. However, it remains a popular choice among content creators and video editors who value its performance and reliability.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis right here is a six dollar pcie riser cable that i got delivered with postage included off of amazon however it didn't really say anything about the specifications nor did it say anything about the speeds and if you're probably thinking well brand is the cheapest pcie riser cable is that going to be okay if i want to say flip a gaming pc and i've got a case that supports a vertical mount for a graphics card well have no fear because in a recent parts hunt i actually came into a case that i got for a very good price it was a thermal take view 31 and that had the option to vertically mount a graphics card and in this video a lot of you guys said you should just buy a pci riser cable and when you go to resell that computer that will hopefully attract a buyer even more than it would by just having the gravis guard in the standard horizontal configuration however it got me thinking well is that person going to lose any performance and if so how much and is it going to present any problems on an older architecture well in today's video we've tested out two different graphics cards we've got a gtx 970 and also a gtx 980 ti we tested it on the newer platform that being the 12th generation intel and we also tested it on a third generation intel ivory bridge motherboard a budget one that i picked up from the junk store so in today's video we'll get those performance numbers done but also if it ends up checking out then i've definitely got myself a safe and reliable budget pcie riser cable that i can use for future pc flips never pay full price for windows 10 or 11 again with today's video sponsor scd keys you can get activated for as little as 15 dollars using that coupon bftyc links in description below welcome back to tech yes city and we're going to be testing out this budget riser cable with the ivy bridge motherboard first and we came into a problem actually and that is that the cable itself is actually not that long it's about 19 centimeters in total and the ribbon itself is only really about 16 centimeters so if you're looking for a longer ribbon definitely go with another choice and this actually limited us in how much room we could mount in the case we actually had to use the second motherboard slot and then that reduced the speeds down to pci express 2.0 x4 on this particular motherboard which is a gigabyte and what happened here was after we did the test we actually came into numbers surprisingly very similar to that of mounting the graphics card in the top slot and so what this meant was the top slot was running at pci 3.0 x16 and this bottom slot with the riser was running at pca 2.0 x4 so massive difference in terms of bandwidth available for the graphics card but the riser cable with the gtx 970 still managed to give out pretty solid performance it was nothing to worry about but one thing that i was actually surprised with was that all the numbers especially in apex legends this is one game that i do pay particular attention to since it is actually pretty well optimized and the game really doesn't have any one percent or 0.1 percent low heavy stuttering even in clutch situations and what i found was when i tested for instance 6500 xt in the past on pci x4 that actually had some real big issues with stuttering and apex legends when it came to the gtx 970 it suffered no problems at this particular pci bandwidth which means that i think the 6500 xt if you're going to go out and buy one of those newer graphics cards it has problems inherent to the graphics card before we even connect it to a motherboard as opposed to a gtx 970 that's not going to suffer from using a cheap cable like this but you may be wondering okay brian what if we put it on a 12th generation motherboard with pcie 4.0 x 16 and this is where the cable actually started reporting that was pci 3.0 x16 so the cable itself will support that full specification except it won't support pci 4.0 so don't try to run it at that but here's where we tested out the 980 ti with the 12 900k and we got pretty much no difference in the numbers the only differences that you will see here in the five games that we tested ranging from fortnite going through to apex legends and then going through to dungeons 3 panzer corpse 2 and also anvil show that these cables even the cheap ones end up being okay now of course it's not the best looking cable in fact you can pay a lot more money and get a all black sleeved cable that is not sort of flappy at the end this one i don't know if you guys can hear that but it's kind of got this cheap plastic surrounding it but i mean for six dollars it's definitely the price performance king of riser cables if you're looking to get something that'll just work and it'll give you 16x pci 3.0 though i decided to also throw in some synthetic benchmarks just in case the fps numbers aren't convincing enough and here's where we'll get a gpu score with the 980 ti on the 12th generation motherboard and that showed no performance difference and in fact even the gtx 970 running at pca 2.0 x4 didn't show a whole lot of a difference either there were all those numbers aside we now have the verdict on the cheap pcie riser cable for six dollars delivered and i'd say the performance is fine i came into absolutely no problems and the numbers speak for themselves so it's going to make a great choice for someone on a budget to get those aesthetics pumped up on a build but speaking of aesthetics it does have this gray light gray ribbon cable and the ends are blue and it does feel a little bit tacky and of course the length of the cable itself may be an issue for you if you're running it from your top slot and the case for instance the vue 31 that we used here today does have quite a long run to get to that vertical mount but those two things aside if you manage to hide the cable and the run isn't that long in your case then it will make for a great value option one that i'll definitely be checking out and using in future builds if the case supports vertical mounting so there it is cheap cable it does the job but of course if you're going for something high-end like say an rx 6000 series graphics card or an rtx 3000 series graphics card then you might just want to grab a pcie 4.0 and spender a few extra dollars when you're going with the high-end stuff me testing it with these 980 ti's and 970s that's exactly where i'm going to be using these budget riser cables to keep the cost down on a ready low budget build so hopefully this video has helped and served you well if you're looking for some kind of information on some of these cheap pci riser cables if it does then be sure to hit that like button and also let us know in the comment section below have you had any horror stories with pcie riser cables love reading your thoughts and opinions because i know with certain riser cables in the past i actually have had some uh problems where either the computer wouldn't boot properly or of course uh things would glitch out and the pc would crash so i was glad to see that this cheap cable here was just no frills and it did the job anyhow guys do let us know in the comment section below love reading your thoughts and opinions as always just like this question of the day here which comes from ferti and they asked brian how do you think this compares to your old workhorse the 1680 v3 4.6 gigahertz that video you featured it against an i9 and ryzen and was always the gateway video introduced your channel to other people so basically they're talking about the 18 core xeon that we actually did a budget video editing rig with and that thing ended up being really good the only drawback i guess would have been the maximum uh core single and both all call boosts on that budget 18 core haswell v3 xeon though that aside i think when it comes to video editing and especially as a workstation the 1680 it was actually the v2 the ivy bridge 8 core 16 thread xeon that we used that was a very good cpu in fact i got to the stage where my workflow just ended up maxing that cpu out and it's a heavy 4k workload like i work through my video editing i'd say i don't know if it's quick or not but i just try to smash through it rts sort of mouse i go through it snap snap snap snap snap and so i need something that will respond and give me the maximum performance possible so i'm looking for not just a snappy experience but i'm also looking for something that'll plow through the work as well and i found when i upgraded later on i got an 18 core i think it was a 7980xe and that was pretty much the best that i've had to this day and now i'm using the 12 900k and it's actually feels like in some ways even though it's faster in certain things it actually feels like it's actually not as snappy as the 18 core which wasn't as snappy as the 1680 v2 so there seems to be a lot of trade-offs when it comes to workflow and using bigger core cpus and even the latest and greatest stuff that uses ddr5 feels like even though the maximum performance can be a lot better in certain situations it feels like some of the minor details can be lost especially due to latency i do notice these things but overall in the end the 1680 v2 especially if you want to do video editing it's going to be a great cpu even in 2022 though i think you just can't get a cpu that is the best at absolutely everything and the best analogy i can give you is in the world of cameras you've got a camera and you want a camera that will do it all but you can't get that camera basically there's no camera that's going to give me the best image stabilization the best battery life and also the best shifting auto focus and even having no shutter roll off that's just not going to happen in the world of cameras so you've always got your trade-offs you just have to make sure at the end of the day whether it's price or performance you're getting the best product in the end that suits you and that's the great thing about desktop enthusiast pc tech there's so much to choose from in that realm and even so with cameras too so hopefully that answers that question with that aside i'll catch you guys in another tech video very soon peace out for now bye youthis right here is a six dollar pcie riser cable that i got delivered with postage included off of amazon however it didn't really say anything about the specifications nor did it say anything about the speeds and if you're probably thinking well brand is the cheapest pcie riser cable is that going to be okay if i want to say flip a gaming pc and i've got a case that supports a vertical mount for a graphics card well have no fear because in a recent parts hunt i actually came into a case that i got for a very good price it was a thermal take view 31 and that had the option to vertically mount a graphics card and in this video a lot of you guys said you should just buy a pci riser cable and when you go to resell that computer that will hopefully attract a buyer even more than it would by just having the gravis guard in the standard horizontal configuration however it got me thinking well is that person going to lose any performance and if so how much and is it going to present any problems on an older architecture well in today's video we've tested out two different graphics cards we've got a gtx 970 and also a gtx 980 ti we tested it on the newer platform that being the 12th generation intel and we also tested it on a third generation intel ivory bridge motherboard a budget one that i picked up from the junk store so in today's video we'll get those performance numbers done but also if it ends up checking out then i've definitely got myself a safe and reliable budget pcie riser cable that i can use for future pc flips never pay full price for windows 10 or 11 again with today's video sponsor scd keys you can get activated for as little as 15 dollars using that coupon bftyc links in description below welcome back to tech yes city and we're going to be testing out this budget riser cable with the ivy bridge motherboard first and we came into a problem actually and that is that the cable itself is actually not that long it's about 19 centimeters in total and the ribbon itself is only really about 16 centimeters so if you're looking for a longer ribbon definitely go with another choice and this actually limited us in how much room we could mount in the case we actually had to use the second motherboard slot and then that reduced the speeds down to pci express 2.0 x4 on this particular motherboard which is a gigabyte and what happened here was after we did the test we actually came into numbers surprisingly very similar to that of mounting the graphics card in the top slot and so what this meant was the top slot was running at pci 3.0 x16 and this bottom slot with the riser was running at pca 2.0 x4 so massive difference in terms of bandwidth available for the graphics card but the riser cable with the gtx 970 still managed to give out pretty solid performance it was nothing to worry about but one thing that i was actually surprised with was that all the numbers especially in apex legends this is one game that i do pay particular attention to since it is actually pretty well optimized and the game really doesn't have any one percent or 0.1 percent low heavy stuttering even in clutch situations and what i found was when i tested for instance 6500 xt in the past on pci x4 that actually had some real big issues with stuttering and apex legends when it came to the gtx 970 it suffered no problems at this particular pci bandwidth which means that i think the 6500 xt if you're going to go out and buy one of those newer graphics cards it has problems inherent to the graphics card before we even connect it to a motherboard as opposed to a gtx 970 that's not going to suffer from using a cheap cable like this but you may be wondering okay brian what if we put it on a 12th generation motherboard with pcie 4.0 x 16 and this is where the cable actually started reporting that was pci 3.0 x16 so the cable itself will support that full specification except it won't support pci 4.0 so don't try to run it at that but here's where we tested out the 980 ti with the 12 900k and we got pretty much no difference in the numbers the only differences that you will see here in the five games that we tested ranging from fortnite going through to apex legends and then going through to dungeons 3 panzer corpse 2 and also anvil show that these cables even the cheap ones end up being okay now of course it's not the best looking cable in fact you can pay a lot more money and get a all black sleeved cable that is not sort of flappy at the end this one i don't know if you guys can hear that but it's kind of got this cheap plastic surrounding it but i mean for six dollars it's definitely the price performance king of riser cables if you're looking to get something that'll just work and it'll give you 16x pci 3.0 though i decided to also throw in some synthetic benchmarks just in case the fps numbers aren't convincing enough and here's where we'll get a gpu score with the 980 ti on the 12th generation motherboard and that showed no performance difference and in fact even the gtx 970 running at pca 2.0 x4 didn't show a whole lot of a difference either there were all those numbers aside we now have the verdict on the cheap pcie riser cable for six dollars delivered and i'd say the performance is fine i came into absolutely no problems and the numbers speak for themselves so it's going to make a great choice for someone on a budget to get those aesthetics pumped up on a build but speaking of aesthetics it does have this gray light gray ribbon cable and the ends are blue and it does feel a little bit tacky and of course the length of the cable itself may be an issue for you if you're running it from your top slot and the case for instance the vue 31 that we used here today does have quite a long run to get to that vertical mount but those two things aside if you manage to hide the cable and the run isn't that long in your case then it will make for a great value option one that i'll definitely be checking out and using in future builds if the case supports vertical mounting so there it is cheap cable it does the job but of course if you're going for something high-end like say an rx 6000 series graphics card or an rtx 3000 series graphics card then you might just want to grab a pcie 4.0 and spender a few extra dollars when you're going with the high-end stuff me testing it with these 980 ti's and 970s that's exactly where i'm going to be using these budget riser cables to keep the cost down on a ready low budget build so hopefully this video has helped and served you well if you're looking for some kind of information on some of these cheap pci riser cables if it does then be sure to hit that like button and also let us know in the comment section below have you had any horror stories with pcie riser cables love reading your thoughts and opinions because i know with certain riser cables in the past i actually have had some uh problems where either the computer wouldn't boot properly or of course uh things would glitch out and the pc would crash so i was glad to see that this cheap cable here was just no frills and it did the job anyhow guys do let us know in the comment section below love reading your thoughts and opinions as always just like this question of the day here which comes from ferti and they asked brian how do you think this compares to your old workhorse the 1680 v3 4.6 gigahertz that video you featured it against an i9 and ryzen and was always the gateway video introduced your channel to other people so basically they're talking about the 18 core xeon that we actually did a budget video editing rig with and that thing ended up being really good the only drawback i guess would have been the maximum uh core single and both all call boosts on that budget 18 core haswell v3 xeon though that aside i think when it comes to video editing and especially as a workstation the 1680 it was actually the v2 the ivy bridge 8 core 16 thread xeon that we used that was a very good cpu in fact i got to the stage where my workflow just ended up maxing that cpu out and it's a heavy 4k workload like i work through my video editing i'd say i don't know if it's quick or not but i just try to smash through it rts sort of mouse i go through it snap snap snap snap snap and so i need something that will respond and give me the maximum performance possible so i'm looking for not just a snappy experience but i'm also looking for something that'll plow through the work as well and i found when i upgraded later on i got an 18 core i think it was a 7980xe and that was pretty much the best that i've had to this day and now i'm using the 12 900k and it's actually feels like in some ways even though it's faster in certain things it actually feels like it's actually not as snappy as the 18 core which wasn't as snappy as the 1680 v2 so there seems to be a lot of trade-offs when it comes to workflow and using bigger core cpus and even the latest and greatest stuff that uses ddr5 feels like even though the maximum performance can be a lot better in certain situations it feels like some of the minor details can be lost especially due to latency i do notice these things but overall in the end the 1680 v2 especially if you want to do video editing it's going to be a great cpu even in 2022 though i think you just can't get a cpu that is the best at absolutely everything and the best analogy i can give you is in the world of cameras you've got a camera and you want a camera that will do it all but you can't get that camera basically there's no camera that's going to give me the best image stabilization the best battery life and also the best shifting auto focus and even having no shutter roll off that's just not going to happen in the world of cameras so you've always got your trade-offs you just have to make sure at the end of the day whether it's price or performance you're getting the best product in the end that suits you and that's the great thing about desktop enthusiast pc tech there's so much to choose from in that realm and even so with cameras too so hopefully that answers that question with that aside i'll catch you guys in another tech video very soon peace out for now bye you\n"