ADT-Link R43SG 4.0 x4 PCIe 4.0 M.2 eGPU Adapter  

While waiting for more components to arrive I got spare time to do something I have never done before, custom loop using rigid tubing. The card for testing is RTX 2080 Ti Hydro Copper. This was an amazing find at the local MicroCenter a month ago. Apparently it was returned many times and the store GM did not want it see it around anymore. It was sold as is. I talked him into final price and it came to $239.96 with the fun notes on the sticker.

I immediately tore it down to investigate what was wrong with it. Some red dye in the block was all I could see. To play it safe, I took the EVGA Hydro Copper GPU block off and mounted a cheap IDCooling GPU AIO on it. The card was stress-tested for 4 weeks mining, with great results and cool temps. So it was time to get it back to the original GPU block.

Building a rigid loop is not an easy process. I wasted an entire 1m PETG tube to make two short connections with 90-degree bends. You can see the red dye in the GPU block starting to dissolve when it's filled. The loop is far from perfect and I still need to do leak test before I dare powering it on.

@itsage,

Unreal, I love it.

It's about time they got their PCIe 4.0 versions out. 

The leak test was successful so I went ahead with powering this thing up. The easy path was to connect the Wavelink TB3 mainboard to this ADT-Link R43SG and run it with my 2018 Mac mini in Boot Camp. I'm using a push and pull fan arrangement on the radiator so I connected a Lamptron CFP30 fan controller.

Everything worked first try with Windows 11 on this Mac mini. The RTX 2080 Ti eGPU actually worked through both cold-plug and hot-plug. The hot-plug behavior is similar to my experience in Windows 10. When the system detects a new PCIe device/s through Thunderbolt connection, WiFi and keyboard/mouse get disabled for about 2 minutes. Once The eGPU is initialized and starts working, everything resumes working.

I did not consider adding a drain plug so it will not be fun taking this thing apart. Right now it's sitting on my dinning table for the foreseable future because I can't really move it.

@itsage, I’m just admiring your photography skills. This thread is 🔥 lit.

Really cool stuff.

@mac_editor, Thank you! I haven't had this much fun learning/trying new stuff in a while. I'm sure my wife will love seeing this mess remains on our dining room until the holidays.

@itsage, and you scored a great deal too imo. Here you’re salvaging GPUs while the world faces shortages. Legend 🔥.

Got all the parts yesterday so I put everything together. Unfortunately, the RX 6900 XT fans were rubbing against the intake cooling fans at the bottom of the case. I switched it out for RTX 3070 Ti which looks like a better match in terms of color scheme.

I also test-fitted the ADT-Link R43SG into the PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 slot. One thing I realized while doing this fitment is that I received a 25cm cable version instead of 50cm. It's just short to let the base sits flat.

Very interesting, @itsage I have been looking into the 4.0 adapters from ADT-Link too.

Just so I understand this properly, in theory 4.0 x4 would perform like 3.0 x8 right? So according to this table, if I have an RTX 2060S etc it would be <1% performance loss compared to 3.0 x16 as opposed to 3.0 x4?

ADT-Link made an JHH-Link Dock-M.2 EXP-like detachable version (and smaller PCB) but only 3.0 x4, may wait?