I've NEVER been so FRUSTRATED... Hot-Swapping PCIe Cards

I remember seeing in the bio settings of this motherboard this very expensive motherboard an option for PCI Express hot swap which I have never personally tried before but what it sounds like is just putting PCI Express cards in and taking them off while the system is running is that gonna work Wow I actually super don't know so let's find out after I tell you about p.i a private Internet access encrypts all your Internet traffic and uses a safe protected IP and it's got a ton of other useful features you can check it out now at the link below [Music] so there's lots of things in a computer that are hot swappable and that we hot-swap every day so USB for example even though you would safely remove the device theoretically with the you know little prompt in the bottom corner anytime you are taking something out or putting something in without powering off first it is technically hot swapping some standards that don't support hot swap like ps2 keyboards for example you can still for the most part hot swap them without any ill effects with all of that said there are components out there that either cannot be hot swapped or have to be specifically designed for hot swap in order to function with it even components like CPUs and memory can actually be hot swap but that's more of a server level feature where the system itself and usually some kind of a daughter board that that slides in or whatever else has to be designed for it because you can't just you can't just cut power to a to a computer component and expect everything to operate normally now as for PCI Express I confess I haven't done a ton of research coming into this so it's possible that the device itself also needs to be designed for hot swap but then it's possible that it doesn't I don't know we're gonna find out today for those of you wondering the the Titan X here I will not be hot swapping bad that's just here so that we have a display output I think it's time for us to go find some victims so this is our selection of random PCI Express cards that are a sort of dubious value these actually this I got for free in scrapyard Wars you know what let's start with these okay so oh yeah before we do this I should probably enable hot swap is no idea what any of these settings do sure looks good to me I wonder what's better black slots or gray slots I'm gonna try a gray slot oh this feels so wrong okay nothing catastrophic appears to have happened okay it's not showing up let's try a restart stop code driver power state failure go ahead and cut okay so one of three things happened here either you have to actually power off for it to be detected we're gonna try that first or we killed it or it was dead already which is quite possible this has been sitting on a shelf for literally years either way it can go over there now all right now this I am at least 40 percent sure works okay whoa hold on a minute whoa whoa whoa hold on a minute I think that's more USB than we had before okay don't cut this clip because no one's gonna believe me if we cut this clip [Music] maybe I was wrong go ahead and cut so after powering down and turning it back on it's working did it not show up because the system had never seen this device before oh oh ouch ooh oh I'm correctable error ouch tried and cut we're gonna disable it then we're gonna pull it we hot unplug something am I gonna get away with a hardware changes scan I'm starting to wonder if these are just bugged on this computer look still in there but I know for a fact that can prove that the hardware is not in there let's just go for it oh damn it go ahead have a different boot drive all right let's try I'm more fresh windows oh there it goes good cut maybe the black slots are bad luck you let me down buddy maybe we just need to try something that's not a storage device how about this network card go ahead and cut so what we think we know so far is that we haven't actually killed any of the hardware we've been experimenting with I did find a couple potential sacrificial cards here so this is like a 50 450 and then this is that Titan that we brutally savaged [Music] so the AMD card seems to have given zero FS just like the network card go ahead and cut it is like an OG Titan it's not it's not very high in anymore we're showing it up let's try restart here oh good cut okay so we're having problems beating at all no so the AMD card is showing up now yeah I think what we have to do is try some more modern hardware a 750 series SSD and let's try a more modern graphics card a 1050 TI o fans turned on table ones definitely getting power come on really has to be a driver thing but so let's see if at least after just a soft reset they show up cuz that will tell us if maybe Windows is the issue wait what the graphics cards not showing up let's pull the SSD [Music] let's fire up Windows server go and cut okay okay bye so I'm an idiot you don't have to enable this I didn't even read it this just says you have to enable this if your OS does not support PCI Express hot-plug go ahead and cut so let's go straight for gold [Music] No here goes the USB Drive no Network [Music] put cut can Linux handle it better it showed up and then it crashed while we were trying Linux I was preparing a server 2016 installation oh shut up best case scenario so we have the presence of mind to disable it before we pull it there's some options or something okay so we've reached the point in this project where it's time to talk to tech support and I did find a really interesting article so this is an Intel white paper about their data center SSDs but as you guys might have noticed when we were booted into Ubuntu this SSD shows up as one of their data center SSDs they're actually based on a very very similar platform in fact they believe they used the same PCB even so I was really hoping that this would behave similarly and they do support hot-swap PCIe including surprise hot ad or hot remove but native OS hot-plug know so we need to have that off ok bios hot plug support is only for if it doesn't support it natively which this says Windows does and we have to ensure that surprise hot plug registers are set correctly so I'm going to try this while I wait for a soos to get back to me go ahead Oh Cole hey all right well I guess if it never detected it can never crash I think I've been going about this all wrong I saw PCI Express hot plug in the BIOS and I went yeah yeah these slots but what if what if they actually mean PCI Express storage over you dot too so this board is actually really unique come have a look at this in that it has four this is part of what it's using all those PCIe lanes on the CPU for it has four u dot two connectors so these are technically four X PCIe slots effectively you can actually just run a cable off of them and plug them into a 16 X slot what they're intended for though are nvme drives like this one this is the same drive as this it's just that instead of this it's got this so the board might only be set up for that on these lanes I mean it's less dramatic looking but this is still potentially really cool which means come on cut so I am NOT defeated our a wonderful contacted a soos gary has actually worked over the weekend it turns out the features there on the board and it's exposed in the files it's not enabled so they have provided me with a beta bios that should enable it I actually wasn't that far off the board is only specifically designed to support this hot-plug functionality on the U dot two ports so theoretically when I flash this BIOS it will enable or unlock that functionality close update I'm this is weird it dropped me right into the BIOS which means I don't know what's going on even a SATA Drive isn't showing up as bootable in here so like there it is can't boot to it it's not even beta BIOS is like alpha BIOS okay you got I sent a sous a complain anything about not being able to boot and I got back did you RTFM they sent me instructions for a bunch of bio stuff to reconfigure in order to enable it so I thought it was just a BIOS update okay so there is some crazy stuff in here I'm supposed to go to socket 1 ports 1 a 2 1 D and here is where I am enabling hot plug and surprise hot plug for my u dot 2 ports okay this is great news reading the manual I want to see this work that's interesting cuttin cuttin okay this is the Ray driver we need there it is okay where's my Drive there it is okay here it is [Music] there it is but off camera I had another idea so there's hot plug options in the BIOS for other PCI Express slots on this board but Asus has specifically told me that there's like a finished system that uses this board as a base that has a special backplane that enables the PCI Express slots themselves to be hot pluggable but that the standalone board doesn't do it so given that following their instructions so far has been my best bet I'm gonna take the word for it but I have something special this is a UDOT to two PCI Express adapter so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take what is effectively again a PCI Express slot and I want to hot plug it I don't know if this is going to work oh well we try this one oh you know what no how far has listening to manufacturer instructions ever gotten anyone so we're gonna change not just ports 1 a 2 1 D we're gonna change all of the ports to surprise hot plug and hot plug and we are just going to follow it and see what happens one last hurrah so something I don't know is if turning on hot plug on the slots could have some kind of adverse effect on some other functionality so first things first this is my best bet for hot pluggable just a sanity check I want to try off the UDOT to again see it's powered though see this is what this is what whoa whoa whoa whoa it's it's on it works whoa it really works check it out check it out activity LED it's fast even writing crazy now I want to push my luck [Music] oh it handled it gracefully the craziest thing is I didn't even have to like refresh device manager it was just like it was like plugging in a USB device so now we're gonna try the network card you recipe card maybe do you see that right there No okay hold hold on hold on USB stick check this out no it's working that's that USB driver now what we need to see is no blue screen it's gone no blue-screen hot-plug pcie okay show me that drive activity [Music] here it is again oh that is crazy now maybe it's slot specific I want to see this server network card work I'm like shaking which is not good I mean that's the most dangerous part of this apparently it's like screwing up and like touching metal on some contacts here or something total madness there it is there it is I want to see it work though we are on the internet on a hot plug okay do we keep pushing the boundaries Brandon do you want to see a video card who do we punish Nvidia or AMD Nvidia what they ever do to you alright here we go okay hands are on I can't even believe this way holy Sh do you think it's gonna let me just like install a game alright install the driver and like run a game like is this as crazy as I think it is we're just plugging and unplugging cards from a motherboard willy-nilly it's on we gotta show that there's no there's no tricks here like look this bench not plugged in this is nothing nothing nothing here this nothing nothing unbelievable this device is working properly is basically everything gonna work here the avermedia TV tuner card let's go back to the very first thing we tried I want to see this system compatibility check me can you imagine that just pop a graphics card in your system and install the driver and go holy crap it worked you saw it here first my friend's hot swapping PCI Express cards in a powered system because you're just a mega baller like that and you don't play by the rules wow this video brought to you by Noble chairs their icon series real leather edition includes real leather and it's available in three different color variants with different stitching patterns they're designed in Germany and inspired by luxury sports car interiors and they have fully adjustable height and recline with a sophisticated the locking mechanism they're available in real and polyurethane leather and you can buy them now at Newegg at the link in the video description so thanks for watching guys if you just liked this video and you can hit bad button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed know that it's real that driver is actually done installing so we've got our Titan X and our 1050 Ti both recognized while you're in the video description you can also check out our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which is a cool place to go talk tech whether it's you know just hey what should I build for my next gaming system or if it's something as random and bizarro land as this

Channel: undefined

Views: 2,279,014

Rating: 4.9067693 out of 5

Keywords: hot-swap, pcie, card, video, audio, usb, overview, motherboard, system, pc, computer, gaming, server

Id: YigN2mkQMPc

Length: 23min 0sec (1380 seconds)

Published: Mon May 07 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/TempAlone]

^{Go ahead and cut}

[u/DIA13OLICAL]

Haven't seen Linus this excited in a while.

[u/slayer991]

So it's really only hotswapple if:

a) you have an updated the BIOS

b) Over U.2 connectors

c) or a backplane card for slot hotswaps.

I wonder how much time Linus spent on this one...

[u/Zebritz92]

That was a nice view! I didn't like frustrated Linus, but natural and excited Linus made me grin a lot! Would love more videos of this kind.