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What I have:

  1. Fujitsu D3307-A12 CP400i 12GB RAID HBA card, cables and couple of SAS drives.
  2. PC with GIGABYTE B760M H DDR4 LGA1700 Micro ATX with free PCIe 4.0 x16 slot.

The PCI slot on MB is longer than the contacts on the RAID board. It looks like it will physically fit but will there be smoke and sparks when I put it there?

The card is PCIe 3.0 x8 (backward compatible to PCIe 2.0). Considering PCI is backwards compatible, then newer slot can fit old card?

Update: can confirm there was no smoke. Installed Ubuntu but thus far have failed to find appropriate drivers and still need to order SAS cables. When connected to two SATA SSD disks for tesing, the card seems to be not supported out of the box. But I guess this is a separate question.

Congenital Optimist
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1 Answers1

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PCIe's pretty standard and backwards compatibility is great. You can generally fit a x8 physical card into an x16 physical slot. There will be no sparks and fire. You can even fit a x4, or an x1 into it. (You can even go the other way, if your slot's open backed)

You won't find x8 slots in most consumer PCs anyway so running it in a x16 slot is your only choice.

I'm currently running an x8 (physical) card in a x16 slot, and its fine. PCIe is designed to do this.

PCI x8 card plugged into a PCIe x16 slot from an extender. only part of the slot's connected, showing the card seated, but there being a large blank space to the right half of the slot.

It'll fit in something like this (I'm using a extender cause its easier to photograph, and I had one from a ongoing project) - it won't lock into the 'back' like a full sized x16 card will into the slot, but it'll work, and alight quite well with the slot.

Journeyman Geek
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