This unique PCIe adapter adds dual SSDs to low-profile GPUs

Here's an interesting piece of hardware you may not have known existed: a Dual PCIe adapter card that adds two PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD slots to the same PCIe slot you use for your GPU. This is for those systems and rigs where a more affordable GPU might not be utilizing all x16 lanes.

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What makes this stand out as an oddity is that the riser card will only work on motherboards that support PCIe bifurcation, which splits the x16 PCIe slot into three lanes: x8, x4, and x4. As posted on Reddit by 'thepromiseman,' they paired what appears to be the RIITOP Dual NVMe PCIe Adapter (available on Amazon for $29.99 USD) with a low-profile GIGABYTE graphics card in a Mini-ITX system.

And with that, the combined height of the GPU and adapter equals the standard height of a non-low-profile GPU. The benefit here is that the user was able to add two standard NVMe SSD slots to their compact system that would have been impossible otherwise. The user also notes that, since their motherboard supports PCIe bifurcation, everything worked without any tinkering or troubleshooting.

Of course, if you were to connect this GPU and SSD creation to a motherboard that doesn't support bifurcation, you'd run into issues. It's a solution that reminds us of the unique ASUS Dual GeForce RTX 4060 Ti SSD OC Edition we reviewed a couple of years ago, which included an M.2 NVMe SSD slot on the backplate to use unused lanes, since the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti was designed with a PCI-Express 4.0 x8 interface.

According to reports on the RIITOP Dual NVMe PCIe Adapter, apparently, you can stack two of these cards on top of each other, bypassing the GPU, to create four M.2 SSD slots.