Sparkle Intros PCIe Gen 4 Quad M.2 Riser Card

[btarunr]

Sparkle introduced the PCIe Gen 4 Quad M.2 Riser Card. This single-slot, full-height card is meant to be installed on a PCI-Express 4.0 x16 slot, which it wires out as four M.2-22110 slots with Gen 4 x4 wiring, and mounting bolt set to M.2-2280 by default. With the drives in place, the card is meant to be covered up by a metal shroud; there's no contact between this shroud and the drives underneath. Cooling comes in the form of two lateral-blower fans that guide airflow under the shroud.

The first (intake) fan is 60 mm in size, while the second one (exhaust, near the tail-end), is 50 mm. Both are controlled by a localized fan-speed control, with three speed settings that can be selected by a 3-way switch on the rear I/O shield. Next to it, are four LEDs that denote power/activity of the individual drives. The card is 28 cm long, and 12 cm tall. What sets Sparkle's card apart from other brands is that the card relies entirely on the PCIe slot for powering itself—unlike some other cards that use a 6-pin connector. The company didn't reveal pricing.



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[Toothless]

If only the shroud had contact with the drives to act as a heatsink.

 

[W1zzard]

Bifurcation required, because no dedicated PCIe bridge chip

 

[Chaitanya]

Didnt know they were still in business, thought they had ceased to exist.

Bifurcation required, because no dedicated PCIe bridge chip

Atleast on AMD platform it shouldnt be a problem while with Intel everything is castrated.

 

[Samus-AR]

What is the point of recovering and spitting out the air inside the case itself?

 

[ChuzzWuzza]

I have one of these in my system on AMD build with bifurcation can take 3 nvme's be a lot cheaper than that sparkly thing
Yes I have tried 4

 

[MachineLearning]

Didnt know they were still in business, thought they had ceased to exist.

Sparkle is now a part of TUL Corporation (like PowerColor, and I think VisionTek as well).

They've been making Intel Arc GPUs for a while now.

 

[Ferrum Master]

They probably use the most fancy and overengineered fan control for these kind of things ever.

 

[Assimilator]

This is basically a carbon copy of ASUS's Hyper M.2 PCIe card (including how the drives are angled) which has been around for literally forever:

And ASUS has already released a PCIe 5.0 version, so no idea why anyone would release a PCIe 4.0 card now.

Sparkle also entirely failed to fix the most annoying thing about this design, which is that it's taller than full-height (see how the PCB sticks up above the slot bracket)? That makes getting the slot screw in there an annoyingly difficult endeavour. If the drive mounts were tilted at, say, 35 or 40 degrees from the horizontal instead of the current 45, the PCB could be cut down to full-height - although a bit longer.

The extra fan is useless and dumb, they've very obviously just shoehorned it in there because there's space on the PCB and they want to appeal to people who don't understand how anything works. The fact that the shroud is cosmetic (versus the ASUS design, where it's a one-piece aluminium heatsink) makes it pretty much useless.

 

[Chaitanya]

This is basically a carbon copy of ASUS's Hyper M.2 PCIe card (including how the drives are angled) which has been around for literally forever:

And ASUS has already released a PCIe 5.0 version, so no idea why anyone would release a PCIe 4.0 card now.

Sparkle also entirely failed to fix the most annoying thing about this design, which is that it's taller than full-height (see how the PCB sticks up above the slot bracket)? That makes getting the slot screw in there an annoyingly difficult endeavour. If the drive mounts were tilted at, say, 35 or 40 degrees from the horizontal instead of the current 45, the PCB could be cut down to full-height - although a bit longer.

The extra fan is useless and dumb, they've very obviously just shoehorned it in there because there's space on the PCB and they want to appeal to people who don't understand how anything works. The fact that the shroud is cosmetic (versus the ASUS design, where it's a one-piece aluminium heatsink) makes it pretty much useless.

I personally think Gigabytes add-in card is a lot better than either of these 2 products as they have integrated 2 thermal sensors/m.2 slot to control fan and its not much taller than PCI-e slot itself(as it has M.2 slots parallel to PCI-e slot). It also has been updated with PCI-e 5 version but havent seen either of those for sale in retail channel or its quite rare and only some unknown retailers sell it.

AORUS Gen4 AIC Adaptor Key Features | SSD - GIGABYTE Global

GIGABYTE, Chassis, Thermal Solution, Power Supply, Optical Device, TV Tuner Card, gamer, PSU

www.gigabyte.com

 

[FeelinFroggy]

Why not use the card as a heat sink? Makes no sense using fans when there is plenty of room for a simple heatsink.

 

[efikkan]

My biggest concern with anything like this is that most fairly capable PC builds can't really use something like this, not without sacrificing the GPU due to lack of PCIe lanes. So unless people want to run this in 8x mode along with their GPU, this becomes a niche product for mostly "HEDT" only. As I've been saying for several years now, I think it was a mistake to bring the high performance and core count CPUs only to mainstream desktops, I'd rather they lowered the entry for HEDT instead, or had some overlap like in the Sandy Bridge-E days. I really miss those platforms, like X79/X99/X299 and the first gen Threadrippers. IO is a mess on current motherboards, and so many of them don't even support the full potential of their chipsets, even with top tier chipsets, like if you want to use the M.2s on the PCH, then you'll loose 2 or 4 SATA ports, or loose the 4x PCIe etc. And these motherboards costs more than HEDT motherboards used to cost…

I think many who considers such products are planning to use 2 or 4 (overpriced) consumer SSDs in RAID0 to boost performance, even though makes for only short bursts of high speed and terrible reliability. While it makes for great click-bait YouTube videos, it makes little sense compared to using a single proper high-end enterprise SSD (like e.g. Kioxia CM7-R/CM7-V), which can run circles around such a setup.

I personally think Gigabytes add-in card is a lot better than either of these 2 products as they have integrated 2 thermal sensors/m.2 slot to control fan and its not much taller than PCI-e slot itself(as it has M.2 slots parallel to PCI-e slot). It also has been updated with PCI-e 5 version but havent seen either of those for sale in retail channel or its quite rare and only some unknown retailers sell it.

AORUS Gen4 AIC Adaptor Key Features | SSD - GIGABYTE Global

GIGABYTE, Chassis, Thermal Solution, Power Supply, Optical Device, TV Tuner Card, gamer, PSU

www.gigabyte.com

And this is just a standard PCIe card right? So it should work on any kind of motherboard, provided it has bifurcation?
I got to ask, because even though anything PCIe should in theory work on anything PCIe, I know there are exceptions when it comes to "exotic" hardware, as not everything behaves 100% according to spec.

Why not use the card as a heat sink? Makes no sense using fans when there is plenty of room for a simple heatsink.

I don't have the maximum power draw of M.2 off the top of my head, but I've seen them as high as 11 W at least, so we're talking in the neighborhood of ~50 W for four of them. In a server/workstation build with airflow through it, a tiny heatsink with small fins will do that just fine, but in a typical desktop where this card would be placed below the GPU and probably have mostly static air, you would have to have a massive heat sink with long fins to rely on that passively. Or do what most motherboard and SSDs do now anyway, just slap a big metal blob on top of there, enough to let it absorb heat long enough to look good in benchmarks, but put any medium sustained load on it and it wouldn't be able to dissipate heat quickly enough and just throttle like crazy.
As you can see in the example Chaitanya provided in the post before you; if there is a tiny bit of airflow, a small heatsink can do just fine.

 

[Chaitanya]

And this is just a standard PCIe card right? So it should work on any kind of motherboard, provided it has bifurcation?
I got to ask, because even though anything PCIe should in theory work on anything PCIe, I know there are exceptions when it comes to "exotic" hardware, as not everything behaves 100% according to spec.

Yep, storage reviews has done a review and they used a Lenovo PC for their testing. So all you need is a board with bifurcation support. Compatibility list on Gigabytes product pages(for both PCIe 5 version and PCIe 4) are quite wierd with one restricted only for AMD platforms while other hasnt been updated since 2019.

 

[CheapMeat]

I find it a bit funny that they added a 2nd rear fan but didn't put any vent holes into the PCI bracket itself, which would help too.