If your box supports vertical graphics card installation, that’s great, but you’ll need to purchase a PCIe riser to be able to “bypass” the graphics card to the socket on the motherboard. Put to it, first-rate manufacturers such as Corsair or Thermaltake have their risers, but at prices much higher than others that are generic. Therefore, we are going to test both to determine if there is a performance difference between a brand name PCIe riser and an OEM one, to determine whether or not it is worth spending more money on.
Installing the graphics card vertically has its pros and cons, but there is no doubt that it looks great in the boxes that support it. The bad part is that almost none comes with the necessary PCIe riser included, and it is a component that we will have to buy separately. As we have mentioned before, there are “brand” ones and there are also generic ones, and the price difference is something that can lead us to think that brand-name ones are better than generic ones, but to what extent is this so? Is there a performance difference? Let’s see it.
Here you can see a couple of examples of a brand riser and a generic (or unknown brand):
Test of performance
To see if there is a difference in performance, we have used the Corsair Premium cable and, precisely, the unknown brand (EZDIY-FAB) that we have put up as an example, whose price difference is that the brand riser literally costs twice as much ( triple if we used Thermaltake’s). Based on the technical specifications of the product, this OEM riser is PCIe 3.0 x16 and includes an EMI filter, so technically there should be no difference.
For testing, we have used the usual equipment consisting of an Intel Core i7-8700K processor with an MSI Z370 Gaming M5 motherboard, 4 × 8 GB Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4-3600 MHz and an EVGA GeForce RTX 2080 XC Gaming , installed in upright in a Corsair Crystal 680X case.
The operating system used has been Windows 10 Pro 64-bit with all the updates installed, and to measure performance we have used 3DMark Time Spy , one of the most recognized benchmarks that exists and that uses the DirectX 12 graphical API. This has been the result:
In the bar graph the difference seems to be quite large in favor of the Corsair riser, but the reality is that if we take as a reference the score of 10641 points with the brand riser, the score of 10344 points is only 2.80 Lower% , a performance loss so slight that we could consider it practically within the margin of error of the measurement.
So is it better to use an OEM PCIe riser than a brand name one?
No, far from it. In this article we wanted to see if there was a difference in performance and we have been able to verify that there is one, although it is quite small. However, we have seen a notable difference between both risers in terms of build quality . Although the OEM riser is not that it is bad or flimsy, it is noticeable that the materials do not have the same quality as those of the Corsair riser, and in fact literally smells of plastic, denoting that they have used materials whose composition … well … let’s say that it is not the most optimal.
In fact, it can be seen at a glance that the Corsair riser has better quality plastics both in the PCI-Express socket and in the connector that goes to the board, and even the “cable” itself that looks like fabric, in the Corsair version it is much harder and more consistent.
In other words: although an OEM riser is going to provide us with what we need to put the graphics card vertically, the feeling it has given us personally is that it will not be too long-lived. It will be necessary to see if after using it for a few months the performance is detrimental or if, on the contrary, the sensations are not correct and the product remains in good condition.
