Thx for that link.
hmm
Maybe I should be going with a normal card that can stop the fans when idle and worrying more about some Molex to SATA straight plug connections.
Do lots of people put their SSD's under the GPU?
Is that a recipe for disaster in terms of drive heat under the GPU like that?
Also, can one of them be a normal 2.5" HDD (I use it for backups only since it's cheaper for large size)
I've got the worst of both worlds with my blower 1080 (noisy and huge). I've looked at those eGPU 1080s and nearly pulled the trigger once or twice. It just seemed like too much of a side-grade to justify dropping $3-400 without a guarantee I could resell my blower 1080 with any sort of recovery of funds. I've come awfully close though since I was kindly also sent a set of the stackers. I figure if I ever upgrade, it'll be an mITX card and I'll finally put them to use.
I've not had any problems with drives behind the video card either. I have three: 1TB Evo, 2TB SSHD, and 1TB janky drive I scavenged from my laptop. The key thing is, like you kind of said, use flat SATA data and power cables. For me, I used a SATA power 1-to-2 splitter that terminates in flat connectors. I also scrounged around for flat data cables. I did some minor power calcs but I'm not too worried about power draw, especially with one of them being an SSD. No fires yet. The only fitment issue I had was that I stuck my laptop drive behind the PCIe extender. The laptop drive has some built-in vibration damping plastic or something which caused it to be a little fatter. I was too lazy to swap my drives around so there it stayed (plus, it was the ugliest so I buried it the farthest back). Neither of the others would have had any problems. Like I said, I'd like to use the stackers... one day. Maybe Navi or Ampere will have what I need (probably Ampere, unfortunately: G-Sync monitor and all).
