Squeezing in two Asus Dual GeForce RTX 5060 Ti OC 16gb cards in HL 15 Version 1

Hardware
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I have two Asus Dual GeForce RTX 5060 Ti OC 16GB cards that I purchased and I did not realize they take up 2.5 slots instead of 2.0 slots, so I need to relocate via a PCIe riser cable either my Sparkle Intel Arc A310 Eco or my LSI 9500-16i HBA. I currently have an HP HPE 10Gb 2-port 562SFP+ Intel® X710 Controller and a Zyyini Quad M.2 NVMe to PCIe 4.0 X16 Adapter. I will not use a PCIe riser cable with either the X710 and the NVMe card.

If you are curious, I could eliminate the Arc A310 entirely but I am using it to transcode for Plex in TrueNas and I plan to pass through the dual 5060 Ti cards to an Ubuntu VM which I will be running an undecided inference engine (e.g. LM Studio, vLLM, Ollama, etc). I understand I could use my CPU to transcode but I was hoping to stick with the Arc A310 but I am open to abandoning it.

Specs: Supermicro H12SSL-NT with 256GB DDR4 ECC RAM and EPYC 7532.

I have a couple of questions:
What is the best location for placing the relocated Sparkle Intel Arc A310 Eco or LSI 9500-16i HBA. I thought about putting it in front of the fans but that would block airflow and seems like a bad idea. There does seem to be space between the CPU heatsink / fan and the Corsair RM1000x power supply.

If I place the Arc A310 or HBA between the CPU and power supply, do I need a right angle or left angle PCIe adapter?

I took some photos but they are not very good (and I can’t upload them anyway). The server is currently in the rack and operating.

Thanks for any assistance!

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Do you run the risk of blocking airflow to the PSU if you put the A310 between the PSU and the motherboard?

I don’t know exact dimensions but other possibilities might be;

  • Mount it to the left case wall using some custom 3D printed bracket and VHB tape.
  • Mount it to the rear of the case above the IO shield facing down if your CPU cooler height allows
  • Mount it on top of the psu with the long side going left/right such that the blower fan is blowing down onto the right hand side of the motherboard and the rest of the shroud is over the PSU

Seems like a lot of jenk for transcoding. If it was important to me to have all of this, I’d probably move the plex server to its own box.

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I think I can find a place to shoehorn the A310 or LSi HBA this weekend when I power the server down. I was just curious if anyone has experience using PCIe extension cables and could provide input. The case appears to be huge but in reality with a full sized motherboard there isn’t as much space as you’d think. I ran the Plex server in a separate box for years but running it in TrueNas as a native app has been a much better experience plus running multiple VM’s under the hood is simpler to manage than physical PC’s. I appreciate the input

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