Quote from: dragonmike on July 06, 2018, 10:51:21 AM

Quote from: CreamyG31337 on July 05, 2018, 10:25:11 PM

You should assume that 1x risers are not supported.
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There's no reason you should ever need a 16x riser to the video card!

I am 100% confused.
Cheesy

Right, so I have two rigs with 7 RX 570's on. Each hooked up with a 1x-to-16x powered riser. Very standard mining setup.
The mobo is MSI Z170A Gaming Pro Carbon. PCI-E Gen 3. Three of the PCI-E slot are PCI-EX16 (support x16/x0/x4 or x8/x8/x4 modes).
The M.2 slot (currently unpopulated) is "1 x 2280 Key M(PCIe Gen3 x4/SATA)".

What should I do/expect from an Acorn in that slot?

Okay so if the max amount of 4x-16x slots on your board is 3, and you have one m.2 slot, ideally you should have 2 video cards and 2 acorns working together, and use the rest of the slots with the 1x risers for normal mining (if you want). Let me explain how I'd do it.
One acorn in the m.2 slot, obviously.
If you had been using that slot, here's what you could buy to move the SSD to an SATA port without cloning it (this might help someone else): https://www.aliexpress.com/item/NI5L-High-quality-PCB-B-Key-M-2-NGFF-SSD-to-2-5-SATA-Converter-Adapter/32797563020.html
2 video cards and one more acorn in an adapter can go in any of the slots that provide 8x/4x
Here's an adapter that will do the minimum required: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/JEYI-SK4-M-2-NVMe-SSD-NGFF-TO-PCIE-X4-adapter-M-Key-interface-card-Suppor/32785472313.html
And then to get at any of the 1x slots you've blocked with the video cards, I'd use these: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Newest-Sale-PCI-E-X1-Extension-Cable-Riser-Card-Extender-USB-3-0-Transfer-Cables-PCI/32861850204.html
There are other SKUs of that same adapter at that same bitCON store (lol) but this is the only one with free shipping (that only works if you order 1 at a time). If you're okay paying a lot more for faster shipping you can save a few cents switching to a different sku or using the mobile app to pay. I also saw them on amazon.com under the ubit name. I don't know why these aren't more popular; they're really hard to find. I wouldn't use the $2-3 cables to extend those slots as those are really trashy looking, and will definitely break eventually. I wouldn't risk connecting the usb direct to the 16x slot from your other riser, use the included one without power and then the complete 1x to 16x riser chained to that. A bit messy, but safe.
Everything I've written assumes you can run your board in pci-e v2 mode. If it's not stable and you need to use v1 you have to use one less acorn because your 4x slot is now useless to it. You also might want to double check that using slots on your board doesn't fuck with the bandwidth to the m.2 slot. I checked https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/Z170A-GAMING-PRO-CARBON/Specification and it looks fine -- it only disables SATA ports 5/6 when you use it, which is easy to work around.