a game where the combination of textures, design, music, etc.. pulls you in so hard you lose yourself for some time

i can say for me lately it was Death Stranding, extremely unique experience, will love to hear other opinions here

In the past few months, I've been slowly reverse engineering all the hardware and software around XGM and have built a dock that allows any PCIe device to be connected to the Ally/Flow through the XGM port. (For those interested, the .)

What is this?

This is an open source hardware that replaces the PCB of the with a new board that is capable of interfacing with XGM. Why XG Station Pro? Simply because I have this and it was collecting dust and the enclosure looks nice. Yes, it would have probably been more ideal to build a more generic design or something that interfaces with OCuLink, but this project was mostly for my own amusement and because it is open source, anyone is free to remix it however they want.

In addition to the PCIe slot, the board also includes a 100W USB-PD charger and a 2-port USB 3.1 Gen 2 hub going to two USB-C ports. All of this can be powered by either the XG Station Pro's power supply or by a DC7450 laptop power supply. Currently, the only way to get PCIe 8-pin power is by passing through 20V to the XG Station's original PCB and then using its FETs to drive the PCIe 8-pin. If you don't have an XG Station, you can use a standard ATX power supply with the power switch shorted.

Performance

The fastest GPU I have is a 3060 Ti so I wasn't able to test anything beyond that. I also have a 5800X3D build with a PCIe 3.0 x16 slot and got the graphics Time Spy score to be 11060 for comparison.

How to build

This project is designed so . I will not be selling it myself because this is a hobby project and I do not want to deal with the hassle of shipping, customer service, handling money, etc. Anyone is free to sell it. I've calculated the manufacture cost (PCB + components + assembly) to be about $75/unit to produce 5 or about $35/unit to produce 100. The cable itself is $129 but the reseller can do a 10% discount if you buy 100. So in that respect, a group buy would probably be the most ideal situation and if a trusted member of the community organizes one and sell everything at cost, I will provide them with help. I do not recommend buying it right now as I am still in the process of testing the rev. 4 design. There could be last minute issues that would have to be fixed. However, the design is near final. I am making this post early in case people want to organize a group buy.

If you do plan to sell this though, the fact that the design is married to the XG Station Pro is probably not a optimal. You should probably change the design and put your own enclosure around it. You should probably also add a PCIe 8-pin power output (I was planning to do it on the top right but didn't have time.). You can also probably change the PCIe slot to an OCuLink port but if you do that, you will likely need to also design some PCIe re-drivers as well because the overall cable length will be too long. Also, the fact that this requires an official XGM cable means at some point, it will probably be impossible to buy. So a wise business person should look into producing 3rd party clones of this cable ASAP...

More details

Want all the dirty details and a bunch of dense technical information about how this was achieved? tl;dr: it was not just a matter of connecting the PCIe pins on the XGM connector. That took about an hour to figure out, the rest was many weeks of work.