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How to use bridge chip PEX8112 with Dell Optiplex GX110 (Intel 810e chipset) ?

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First post, by enloop

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I thought this was going to be a simple case of connect pcie card to bridge chip adapter and boom I get a more powerful GPU for the aging PCI slot machine. That has not been the case at all. I have tried many different gpus and I made sure that they did not go over the wattage requirements, although I am unsure how much wattage the bridge adapter is using. I've tried two different Radeon cards, and three different Nvidia cards.

They all locked up the BIOS if I had them selected as the primary graphics. Selecting onboard only allows it to get through bios where the results will vary after that point.

I think only one Nvidia card had the results I was looking for which was having the Windows XP operating system allow me to install the driver for it And get a display from it.. However when it came to using it, for any sort of acceleration or decoding, the card seemed to be idle according to GPU-Z although I haven't really tried any 3D games. It gives me the impression like the card has not been properly initialized to function correctly?

Another quirk I noticed is for a live Linux distro that I was booting into, modeset was set to disabled for the Nvidia card and same case for the Radeon. I'll be honest, I don't know if that's uncommon for the live distro and maybe the results would be a little different on an installed OS. So I guess I can try that after I get that done later to confirm.

I was half tempted to just look for one of the late PCI cards with the bridge chip in it already. But logically I think I would still run into the same issue for this particular machine. I do know there are some cases of people overcoming this unique problem, but I'm not fully convinced to follow anything AI can suggest at this point. That's why I am here asking for anybody's expertise in this niche situation.

I am willing to flash chips and dump any bios or vbios, if there is a legitimate solution within grasp here. Ultimately, I want to make a slightly more modern Radeon card work for my Windows XP and Linux OS. Any ideas? Or if you need any more information I'll try to give as much as I could.

Reply 1 of 4, by Mamba

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Hello,
I have some experience.
First, make sure the gpu you are using do not requires more than 30 watt.
A very good card is a HD5450, plenty of power (for a P-III) and all decoding you want done in hardware.
Second,
Make sure the bridge really works, they are cheaply made so a malfunction is highly possible.
Third,
Some server motherboards won’t work with gpu and bridges, no matter what. There should be something at bios level, not sure what, but happens. Your best bet is a non bridged pci card if you need to stick with your Dell motherboard.

Reply 2 of 4, by enloop

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Mamba wrote on 2026-07-27, 05:30:
Hello, I have some experience. First, make sure the gpu you are using do not requires more than 30 watt. A very good card is a H […]
Show full quote

Hello,
I have some experience.
First, make sure the gpu you are using do not requires more than 30 watt.
A very good card is a HD5450, plenty of power (for a P-III) and all decoding you want done in hardware.
Second,
Make sure the bridge really works, they are cheaply made so a malfunction is highly possible.
Third,
Some server motherboards won’t work with gpu and bridges, no matter what. There should be something at bios level, not sure what, but happens. Your best bet is a non bridged pci card if you need to stick with your Dell motherboard.

All gpus are at or under 25W. I've been reading a little more and I think there might be a bigger issue that has something to do with the bridge chips expecting to work with PCI 2.3 and the GX110 chipset uses PCI 2.2.. maybe has something to do with how voltages are handled?.. not sure

Reply 3 of 4, by zyga64

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I managed to successfully run a Radeon x600 Pro on a motherboard with an i845G chipset (with integrated Intel Extreme Graphics) using such an adapter.
I tested 3D Marks 2000 and 2001 and Quake 3, and it worked very well.
However, this only works with Windows XP. I couldn't install the drivers under Windows 98.

I suspect that if we could find PLX_PCI_SDK_v4.40_Final_2006-05-01.exe somewhere, chances would be better.
According to information on the web, it's the last SDK that had drivers for Windows 9x.


8088@8 /640k /Genoa CGA /ALS100
286@20 /4M /CL-GD5422 /CMI8330
486DX33 /16M /TGUI9440 /GUS+ALS100+MT32PI
K6-2@400 /64M /MGA-2064W+3dfx /YMF718
P!!!750 /256M /MX440 /Vibra16s+SBLive!

Reply 4 of 4, by Mamba

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enloop wrote on 2026-07-27, 06:02:
Mamba wrote on 2026-07-27, 05:30:
Hello, I have some experience. First, make sure the gpu you are using do not requires more than 30 watt. A very good card is a H […]
Show full quote

Hello,
I have some experience.
First, make sure the gpu you are using do not requires more than 30 watt.
A very good card is a HD5450, plenty of power (for a P-III) and all decoding you want done in hardware.
Second,
Make sure the bridge really works, they are cheaply made so a malfunction is highly possible.
Third,
Some server motherboards won’t work with gpu and bridges, no matter what. There should be something at bios level, not sure what, but happens. Your best bet is a non bridged pci card if you need to stick with your Dell motherboard.

All gpus are at or under 25W. I've been reading a little more and I think there might be a bigger issue that has something to do with the bridge chips expecting to work with PCI 2.3 and the GX110 chipset uses PCI 2.2.. maybe has something to do with how voltages are handled?.. not sure

Simply put,
No.

Make sure the other two points are fulfilled.

As said, it depends from motherboard vendor to motherboard vendor and bios implementation.

But feel free to start this journey yourself.

A useless short analysis on PCIX to PCIe bridge performance on Tualatin

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