I have been playing around with my own oculink 8i board that I got produced, but it seems like I am getting no life from the laptop to initialize the GPU. I have double checked my diff pair wiring with the m.2 expansion bay board through a 4i oculink adapter, so the pairs and refclk are definitely connected correctly.
The only issue I can imagine is if my CLKREQ or PERST wiring isn’t right. I did try to connect CLKREQ directly to GND and then also 3.3V through a 10kOhm resistor, as according to this PCIe For Hackers: Link Anatomy | Hackaday article, CLKREQ should be pulled down to request the clock signal. For PERST I connected it directly to the oculink port but I did also try to do the same things I did with CLKREQ to no avail. The laptop simply does nothing to try to initialize the link to the GPU even after that. By “initialize” I mean that the GPU doesn’t show up at all, no enumeration, nothing.
I would greatly appreciate if someone with more know-how could help with this, as I am completely stuck with the project and have no way to proceed. I unfortunately also have no oscilloscope to test if I am actually receiving any signal. @Gu_tally do you perhaps have any basic schematic to show how the wiring is connected? I’ll be editing this post shortly to post my KiCad project if anyone wants to check out what I could have done wrong.