 I remember seeing in the BIOS settings of this motherboard, this very expensive motherboard, an option for PCI Express Hot Swap, which I have never personally tried before, but what it sounds like is just putting PCI Express cards in and taking them off while the system is running. Is that gonna work? Wow, I actually super don't know. So let's find out. After I tell you about PIA. Private Internet Access encrypts all your internet traffic and uses a safe, protected IP, and it's got a ton of other useful features. You can check it out now at the link below. So there's lots of things in a computer that are hot swappable and that we hot swap every day. So USB, for example, even though you would safely remove the device theoretically with the, you know, little prompt in the bottom corner, any time you are taking something out or putting something in without powering off first, it is technically hot swap. And some standards that don't support hot swap, like PS2 keyboards, for example, you can still for the most part hot swap them without any ill effects. With all of that said, there are components out there that either cannot be hot swapped or have to be specifically designed for hot swap in order to function with it. Even components like CPUs and memory can actually be hot swapped, but that's more of a server level feature where the system itself and usually some kind of a daughter board that slides in or whatever else has to be designed for it because you can't just cut power to a computer component and expect everything to operate normally. Now, as for PCI Express, I confess, I haven't done a ton of research coming into this. So it's possible that the device itself also needs to be designed for hot swap, but then it's possible that it doesn't. I don't know. We're going to find out today. For those of you wondering the Titan X here, I will not be hot swapping that. That's just here so that we have a display output. I think it's time for us to go find some victims. So this is our selection of random PCI Express cards that are of sort of dubious value. These I actually, this I got for free in Scrapyard Wars. You know what? Let's start with these. Okay. So, uh, oh, yeah, before we do this, I should probably enable hot swap. Ah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There it is. No idea what any of these settings do. Sure. It looks good to me. I wonder what's better. Black slots or gray slots? I'm going to try a gray slot. Oh, this feels so wrong. Okay. Nothing catastrophic appears to have happened. Okay. It's not showing up. Let's try a restart. Stop code driver power state failure. Go ahead and cut. Okay. So one of three things happened here. Either you have to actually power off for it to be detected. We're going to try that first. Or we killed it. Or it was dead already, which is quite possible. This has been sitting on a shelf for literally years. Either way, it can go over there now. All right. Now this, I'm at least 40% sure works. Okay. Whoa. Now hold on a minute. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on a minute. I think that's more USB than we had before. Okay. Don't cut this clip because no one's going to believe me if we cut this clip. Maybe I was wrong. Go ahead and cut. So after powering down and turning it back on, it's working. Did it not show up because the system had never seen this device before? Oh, oh, oh, ouch. Ooh. Oh, uncorrectable error. Ouch. Go ahead and cut. We're going to disable it. Then we're going to pull it. We hot unplugged something. Am I going to get away with a hardware changes scan? I'm starting to wonder if these are just bugged on this computer. Look, it's still in there. But I know for a fact, see, I can prove that the hardware is not in there. Let's just go for it. Oh, damn it. Go ahead and cut. I'm going to grab a different boot drive. Go ahead and cut. All right. Let's try a more fresh windows. Oh, it's not working. I'm going to try a different boot drive. All right. Let's try a more fresh windows. Enable. Oh, there it goes. Go ahead and cut. Maybe the black slots are bad luck. Let me down, buddy. Go ahead and cut. Maybe we just need to try something that's not a storage device. How about this network card? Go ahead and cut. So what we think we know so far is that we haven't actually killed any of the hardware we've been experimenting with. I did find a couple of potential sacrificial cards here. So this is like a 5450. And then this is that Titan that we brutally savaged. So the AMD card seems to have given zero F's, just like the network card. Go ahead and cut. This is like an OG Titan. It's not very high end anymore. Neither of them are showing up. Let's try a restart here. Oh, my God. Is that windows update? Go ahead and cut. OK, so we're having problems booting at all. Go ahead and cut. Holy s**t. No. Oh, my. What the? Don't prompt again. No. So the AMD card is showing up now. I think what we have to do is try some more modern hardware, a 750 series SSD. And let's try a more modern graphics card, a 1050Ti. Oh, fans turned on. That one's definitely getting power. Come on. Really? It has to be a driver thing. So let's see if at least after just a soft reset, they show up, because that will tell us if maybe windows is the issue. Wait, what? The graphics card's not showing up. Let's pull the SSD. Oh, f**k. Let's fire up Windows Server. Go ahead and cut. OK, OK, bye. So I'm an idiot. You don't have to enable this. I didn't even read it. This just says you have to enable this if your OS does not support PCI Express hot plug. Go ahead and cut. So let's go straight for gold. No, here goes the USB drive. Network. Network. Go ahead and cut. Can Linux handle it better? It showed up and then it crashed. Go ahead and cut. While we were trying Linux, I was preparing a Server 2016 installation. Oh, shut up. Best case scenario. So we have the presence of mind to disable it before we pull it. Oh, s**t. Maybe there's some options or something. Go ahead and cut. OK, so we've reached the point in this project where it's time to talk to tech support. And I did find a really interesting article. So this is an Intel white paper about their data center SSDs. But as you guys might have noticed when we were booted into Ubuntu, this SSD shows up as one of their data center SSDs. They're actually based on a very, very similar platform. In fact, I believe they use the same PCB even. So I was really hoping that this would behave similarly. And they do support hot swap PCIe, including surprise hot add or hot remove. But native OS hot plug, no. So we need to have that off. OK, BIOS hot plug support is only for if it doesn't support it natively, which this says Windows does. And we have to ensure that surprise hot plug registers are set correctly. So I'm going to try this while I wait for Asus to get back to me. Go ahead and cut. Oh, no. Go away. All right. Well, I guess if it never detects it, it can never crash. Go ahead and cut. I think I've been going about this all wrong. I saw PCI Express hot plug in the BIOS and I went, yeah, heck yeah. These slots. But what if what if they actually mean PCI Express storage over U.2? So this board is actually really unique. Come have a look at this in that it has four. This is part of what it's using all those PCIe lanes on the CPU for. It has four U.2 connectors. So these are technically 4x PCIe slots. Effectively, you can actually just run a cable off of them and plug them into a 16x slot. What they're intended for, though, are NVMe drives like this one. This is the same drive as this. It's just that instead of this, it's got this. So the board might only be set up for that on these lanes. I mean, it's less dramatic looking, but this is still potentially really cool, which means. Go ahead and cut. So I am not defeated. Our wonderful contact at ASUS, Gary, has actually worked over the weekend. It turns out the features there on the board and it's exposed in the BIOS, it's not enabled. So they have provided me with a beta BIOS that should enable it. I actually wasn't that far off. The board is only specifically designed to support this hot plug functionality on the U.2 ports. So theoretically, when I flash this BIOS, it will enable or unlock that functionality. Close. Update time. This is weird. It dropped me right into the BIOS, which means I don't know what's going on. Even a SATA drive isn't showing up as bootable in here. So like, there it is. Can't boot to it. It's not even beta BIOS. It's like alpha BIOS. Okay, you can cut. I sent ASUS a complainy thing about not being able to boot. And I got back. Did you RTFM? They sent me instructions for a bunch of BIOS stuff to reconfigure in order to enable it. So we're going to do that. I thought it was just a BIOS update. Okay, so there is some crazy stuff in here. I'm supposed to go to socket one ports 1A to 1D. And here is where I am enabling hot plug and surprise hot plug for my U.2 ports. Okay, this is great news. Reading the manual. I want to see this work. That's interesting. Go ahead and cut. Okay, this is the RAID driver we need. There it is. Okay, where's my drive? There it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. Okay, here it is. There it is. But off camera, I had another idea. So there's hot plug options in the BIOS for other PCI Express slots on this board. But ASUS has specifically told me that there's like a finished system that uses this board as a base that has a special backplane that enables the PCI Express slots themselves to be hot pluggable. But that the standalone board doesn't do it. So given that following their instructions so far has been my best bet, I'm going to take the word for it. But I have something special. This is a U.2 to PCI Express adapter. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take what is effectively again a PCI Express slot. And I want to hot plug it. I don't know if this is going to work. Oh no dice. Why don't we try this one? Okay, no. You know what? No. How far has listening to manufacturer instructions ever gotten anyone? So we're going to change not just ports 1A to 1D. We're going to change all of the ports to surprise hot plug and hot plug. And we are just going to go low it and see what happens. One last hurrah. So something I don't know is if turning on hot plug on the slots could have some kind of adverse effect on some other functionality. So first things first, this is my best bet for hot pluggable. Just sanity check. I want to try off the U.2 again. See, it's powered though. See, this is what this is what's. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. It's it's on. It works. Oh, it really works. Check it out. Check it out. Activity LED. It's fast. Even writing. Crazy. Now I want to push my luck. Oh, it handled it gracefully. The craziest thing is I didn't even have to like refresh device manager. It was just like it was like plugging in a USB device. So now we're going to try the network card. USB card maybe. Do you see that? Right there. No. OK, hold on, hold on. USB stick. Check this out. No, it's working. That's that USB drive. Now what we need to see is no blue screen. It's gone. No blue screen. Hot plug PCIe. OK. Show me that drive activity. There it is again. Oh, that is crazy. Now, maybe it's slot specific. I want to see this server network card work like shaking, which is not good. I mean, that's the most dangerous part of this. Apparently, it's like screwing up and like touching metal on some contacts here or something. Total madness. There it is. There it is. I want to see it work, though. We are on the Internet on a hot plug. OK. Do we keep pushing the boundaries, Brandon? Do you want to see a video card? Who do we punish? Nvidia or AMD? Nvidia? What they ever do to you. All right, here we go. OK, fans are on. I can't even believe this. No way. Holy shit. Do you think it's going to let me just like install a game or install the driver and like run a game like is this as crazy as I think it is? We're just plugging and unplugging cards from a motherboard willy nilly. It's on. We got to show that there's no there's no tricks here. Like, look, this bench not plugged in. This is nothing. Nothing. Nothing here. This. Nothing. Nothing. Unbelievable. This device is working properly. Is basically everything going to work here? The AverMedia TV tuner card. Let's go back to the very first thing we tried. I want to see this system compatibility check. Can you imagine that? Just pop a graphics card in your system and install the driver and go. Holy crap, it worked. You saw it here first, my friends. Hot swapping PCI Express cards in a powered system because you're just a mega baller like that and you don't play by the rules. Wow. 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