I'm looking to create a DIY PCIe riser cable for a PCIe x1 slot. My plan is to stick strips of aluminum foil onto an old PCB with contact cement, then solder some jumper wires from an Arduino kit to the foil. For the actual PCIe connection, I want to solder the other ends of the wires to the pins of two slots from an old SLI bridge, as I believe they share similar connections to regular PCIe slots. While I know the SLI slots are different lengths, I don't think that will be a big issue since there should be enough pins. If needed, I can set the motherboard PCIe slot to PCIe 1.0 to simplify things. My main question is whether this setup has a chance of working, or will issues like crosstalk make it impossible?
3 Answers
It sounds like you're planning a hefty project with a lot of solder points! With a ribbon made of 164 cables, you could end up with around 1640 solder points if you use multiple ribbons. That's a ton of tiny points to manage, and the risks of something going wrong are pretty high. You might wanna consider just buying a cheap riser cable. They're only a few bucks and it'll save you a lot of time and frustration!
If you really want to go this route, you could design a specialized 4-layer high-speed PCB and get it made. It's not as expensive as you might think with places like Oshpark. Just throwing that out there as an option!
Honestly, I don't think this will work. PCIe connections are very fast and require precise impedance and length matching. Building a custom PCB might be possible, but a DIY cable like you're suggesting is a different story—it's pretty much impossible without professional design and equipment.