I need to temporarily connect a HBA card to my laptop,
I am not sure why the prices on these things range so widely:
I don’t really need the bulk of an eGPU enclosure and I am pretty happy to supply 12VDC from a bench supply instead of an ATX PSU.
Any suggestions?
A lot of them need an actual atx psu for the 3.3V and5 5V rails so 12V only is a somewhat rare feature.
I use this for my “random pcie device” needs, it doesn’t have the best bandwidth or power delivery to the laptop but it can be powered from just 12v(or actually even less if the device can live with it) and is very compact
It has an input usb-c port that will try to negotiate 12v from a pd power supply but it’ll also go lower. Turns out most of my 10gbit nics work just fine with 5V on the 12V rail XD.
Stuff like the ut3g/ut4g/th3p4 have much better bandwidth but they do require a full atx power supply.
If you want USB4 use USB4 not Thunderbolt4. There are 2 Pure PCIE4 to USB4 Adapter. The ADT-Link UT3G and ADT-Link UT4G. Both feature the full 40GBPS Bandwith to the PCIE Slot but no Powerdelivery and no USB Devices on the “Dock”
And need a full atx psu with 3.3 and 5v. Full usb4 is certianly higher performance but I don’t think that is what op was asking for.
For an egpu definitely go ut3/4g but for plugging in random pcie devices something oder/simpler tends to be more convenient.
Ended up going with a “USB4 Thunder Adapter Board” (really) from Taobao. It does appear to be impossible to get a direct link to a Taobao item.
It’s got input for a 12V barrel jack. I haven’t disassembled it to check what it’s doing in terms of changing voltages.
Damn I must be stupid, but I needed an adapter like that to do PCIe to thunderbolt/USB-c to be able to access the PCIe bus… but I can’t find the taobao adapter you found hahaha