Your Main PC

What you need

• A desktop, preferably.
  Laptops can be made to work and there is a section at the end on why we would rather you did not.
• One free PCIe slot, with clear space below, above and beside it.
  Graphics cards are thick and usually block whatever is under them.
• A reasonably modern motherboard.
  Nothing older than a B550-era board. Compatibility on older boards is poor, and even B550 boards themselves are mixed. If yours turns out not to work, we fix it or replace it, and on the very rare occasion it still doesn't work after that, we refund you. B550 is an AMD chipset. On Intel, the same era is a board from 2020 or newer, and Private needs a 2020 or newer Intel board with an 11th gen processor or newer.

Finding a free slot

Take the side panel off and look at the motherboard. The PCIe slots are the connectors running left to right, underneath where the graphics card plugs in. They come in different lengths:

• x1 is the short one, about 25mm. One lane.
• x4, x8 and x16 get progressively longer and carry more lanes.

Your card only uses one lane, so the shortest slot on the board is plenty. It also drops straight into a longer slot, which looks odd and works exactly the same.

Once you have worked out which slots are free and what motherboard you have, open your motherboard's manual and find its PCIe or expansion-slot table. It lists lines like M2_2 shares bandwidth with PCIEX4_2, and that table is the answer for your board. If the manual is heavy going, an AI can help you read it, but the manual is the one that is right:

"Hey, I'm on a (your motherboard), and the (2nd, 3rd and 4th slot down) are free. Which ones do not share lanes with my M.2 or graphics card?"

It will give you your options. If you do not know your board model, press the Windows key, type System Information, and read BaseBoard Product.

Which slot to actually pick

The safe layout on any modern board is: graphics card in the top full-length slot, boot drive in the primary M.2 socket, everything else after that. Your card is the everything else.

So pick a spare slot that is not tied to something you are using. Two things to avoid:

• A slot that shares lanes with an M.2 drive you have filled.
  This is a common issue. A shared lane can switch the card off completely, or drop your M.2 drive to fewer lanes. Pick a slot that shares with nothing you use. Look at the section right above to find a slot that doesn't share its lane with anything heavy.
• A slot that takes lanes from the graphics card.
  Only happens on boards that split the processor's sixteen lanes, and only if you fill a second full-length slot. Your graphics card then runs at x8 instead of x16, which in real games costs a couple of percent at most. Realistically it will never happen to you, because your card belongs in a small chipset slot. If it does, the fix is to move the card to a different slot.

One exception worth knowing.
A few boards will only bring a DMA card up in the top x16 slot. If your card refuses to appear in a spare slot, that is worth trying before you assume the card is dead.

Why slots share lanes at all

Slots on a board are not independent.

• A consumer processor only has a handful of PCIe lanes.
• Most of them go straight to the graphics card, and usually four more to one M.2 socket.
• Everything else hangs off the chipset, which reaches the processor over one shared link.
• There are more slots and sockets on the board than there are lanes to feed them, so some get wired to the same lanes and the board switches between them.

That is why manuals say things like M2_2 shares bandwidth with PCIEX4_2, or when M2_2 is populated, PCIEX4_2 is disabled. It is also why not all M.2 sockets are equal: some come off the processor, some off the chipset, and some switch off SATA ports when you use them.

What is fine to share.
Your card asks for almost nothing. It uses one lane and cannot use more, so sharing the chipset link with your USB ports, drives and network adapter is not a problem for either of them.

Room for the card

Graphics cards are one, two, three, sometimes four slots thick, meaning a slot can be empty but unusable. Check with the graphics card in place.

The card itself is small.
The GODLIKE 100T is 3 × 3 × 0.5 inches. It draws under 10W, all of it from the slot, so there is no power cable to plug in. A PCIe x1 slot only gives a card 10W to start with, and the maker does not publish an exact figure.

The bracket at the back.
Every slot has a thin metal cover to the left of it on the back of the case, and that is where your card's bracket, if it has one, and its cords go. You take it out before you put the card in. Most are held by one screw, and cheaper cases use ones you snap out, which obviously do not go back, so make sure you have the right one first. Taking one out does nothing to the case or the computer. It is a cover over a hole.

If the only free slot is covered/blocked

A PCIe riser is basically an extension for your PCIe slot. It goes into your slot, and the card goes into it.

• Keep it short.
  Length is where signal quality goes.
• Do not buy the cheapest one.
  Get a short, well-shielded PCIe x1 riser, under about 20cm. Bad risers make cards slow and unstable, and sometimes stop them working at all. Spend a little more to save yourself the headache.

About laptops

People do get this working, and it is worth understanding how before we tell you not to.

• There is no slot, so people use an M.2 socket instead.
  Those are the small sockets inside the laptop that your SSD and your Wi-Fi card plug into, and they carry PCIe lanes. DMA cards are made in M.2 shape for reasons like this. Ours are the normal slot kind.
• Which means something has to come out.
  Most laptops have one M.2 socket holding the SSD and one smaller one holding the Wi-Fi card. Take the SSD out and you have nothing to boot from. Take the Wi-Fi card out and you are on Ethernet or a USB adapter from then on. Some laptops have a spare second M.2 socket, and if yours does, that is the one to use.
• Or a Thunderbolt or USB4 enclosure.
  A box with a normal PCIe slot inside it that plugs into the laptop with one cable. Nothing has to come out of the laptop and the card stays an ordinary card. You need a real Thunderbolt port, or a USB4 port that supports PCIe, not just a USB-C shaped one.

We do not recommend it and we cannot help you with it.
We would rather say it than sell you something and leave you.

Why:

• You run with the back cover off, because the cable has to come out somewhere.
• Cable routing around a laptop is fragile and gets knocked.
• Every laptop is different and we cannot test yours, so when it goes wrong we have nothing useful to tell you.

If a desktop is an option at all, take it. Laptop insides are fragile and you can easily break something important.

Can I use a DMA card with a laptop? also covers using a laptop as your second computer.

What does not matter

• The processor.
  Whatever came with a board of that era. The card does not care which one it is. The exceptions are Private, which only runs on Intel, and Vanguard, which needs an Intel processor on every build that covers it. Choosing your firmware has each build.
• Your graphics card.
  Only the room it takes up matters.
• Your power supply.
  The card takes its power from the slot. There is no cable to plug in.

Before you buy

All four ticked means your main PC is ready. When the card arrives, Main PC Setup walks you through fitting it, and after that comes the second computer.