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Cable Assemblies
Industrial, IT Datacom
A complete x8 PCIe cable link on a single assembly, built for card-to-card wiring inside 1U and 2U chassis where every millimeter of routing space and every lane of bandwidth counts. CONSHARE assembles this cable around industry-standard MCIO 8-way headers, so it mates with the board connectors already on your controller cards, retimers, and backplanes — no re-layout, no proprietary footprint lock-in.
If you are routing a full x8 Gen5 link between two boards less than a third of a meter apart, this is the one-cable answer — no lane splitting, no mid-plane, no double-hop.
Many intra-chassis interconnects force you to break an x8 device across two x4 cables or pass through a midplane. Splitting lanes doubles the connector count, doubles the failure points, and doubles the assembly labor at your contract manufacturer. An 8-way assembly carries the whole link in a single run, which shows up directly in your build yield and your field failure statistics.
Three hundred millimeters covers the typical hop in a standard rack server — CPU board to NIC riser, motherboard to retimer card, controller to a nearby drive zone. It is short enough that the twinax pairs inside stay in a comfortable signal-loss zone at Gen5 data rates, and long enough to include a small service loop without leaving a slack coil stuffed against a fan wall. If your measured route plus service loop lands anywhere between 240 and 300 mm, this is the right SKU; if it is longer, order a longer variant instead of stretching this one to its limit.
Choose the straight-exit version when your cable leaves the header and climbs directly toward another board above or beside it — not when you need the cable to hug the PCB immediately after mating.
Routing situation | Straight exit (this SKU) | Right-angle exit |
|---|---|---|
Cable goes up toward a card in the next slot row | Better — natural exit line, no cable-kink stress | Cable must bend immediately at the latch |
Cable must run flat along the board surface | Poor fit — the exit blocks low routing | Better by design |
Tight Z-height under a fan shroud | Usually fine, exits vertically in a narrow envelope | Better where shroud clearance is extreme |
Adjacent headers packed side by side | Fine, the latch face stays accessible | Depends on latch direction |
The honest summary: straight exit buys you a clean vertical path and an easy-to-reach latch; it costs you the low-profile lay-flat routing that a right-angle version gives. Engineering teams that misjudge this end up replacing assemblies in the field, because a cable forced into an immediate 90-degree bend at the connector is the single most common cause of intermittent differential pairs in racked systems.
Count lanes first, measure the route second, check header orientation third — in that order — and the part choice makes itself.
An x8 network adapter, an x8 NVMe controller, or a single retimer leg maps one-to-one onto this cable. An x16 device takes two of them. An x4 device wastes half the cable — order the narrower assembly instead. The point sounds obvious, but the most common purchasing error CONSHARE sees is over-specification: buyers order 8-way assemblies for 4-lane links because "more is safer," then fight the unused width in already crowded cable channels.
Measure the actual path — around fan blocks, over structural ribs, not through them — then add roughly 20 to 30 mm for a strain-relief loop at both ends. That total is your length. Buying at the exact straight-line distance guarantees a cable that installs under tension and works loose under chassis vibration.
These assemblies follow the open MCIO 8-way footprint, so they seat on headers from multiple connector suppliers. Confirm your board uses the standard 8-way header and note its mounting direction before volume ordering; samples are available to verify fit on your actual PCB before you commit the build.
AI training servers, Gen5 NIC riser cabling, and dense all-flash storage trays are the three deployments where this exact configuration pays back fastest.
Dual-GPU boards routinely hand a Gen5 link to a retimer card that forwards it onward. The retimer card typically sits one or two slot rows away — precisely the geometry a straight-exit, 300 mm assembly was shaped for. Build teams wiring hundreds of these links value the single-piece link because every avoided connector pair is one less impedance discontinuity to debug at 3 a.m. before a cluster burn-in.
In a 1U chassis, the riser sits millimeters from the chassis lid. The straight exit needs almost no clearance above the latch, and the cable exits vertically into the space that is actually available — the slot channel — rather than demanding lay-flat room that a 1U floor plan does not have.
Connecting a drive-zone controller expander to an upstream host board inside a 2U tray is a sub-300 mm hop nine times out of ten. Storage integrators standardizing on one cable length across a drive tray line simplify spares inventory to a single line item, which their field service teams quietly appreciate.
Every cable ships after passing a full electrical test — continuity, pair shorts, and contact-resistance limits on all eight lanes — not on a sample basis.
One hundred percent end-of-line testing means a marginal crimp or a suspect solder joint never leaves the floor. Differential pairs get checked as pairs, in both directions, against defined pass thresholds. This is the difference between a cable that passes goods-inward inspection and a cable that quietly degrades a link over months of thermal cycling.
Latch engagement gets verified on every assembly — the click is a specification, not a courtesy. Cables are coiled at radius, never creased, and packed in trays that keep the connectors from knocking against each other in transit. Connector shells arriving scratched or latches arriving cracked are a packing failure, and they are treated as one.
The 300 mm straight configuration is a running item with standing raw-material stock, so sample and pilot quantities ship fast — typically within days, not weeks. Volume orders run on scheduled production windows, and repeat orders from qualified customers skip re-qualification, which compresses replenishment cycles for the purchasing teams planning build schedules around component arrivals.
Length, labeling, and connector pairing can all be re-specified — the 300 mm straight build is the standard reference, not the limit.
Custom item | What CONSHARE can do |
|---|---|
Cable length | Cut-to-order lengths around the standard 300 mm, subject to minimum and maximum link-budget limits |
Far-end connector | Pair this end with other standard high-density I/O terminations to build a hybrid assembly |
Marking | Custom length and batch laser or label marking for asset tracking and spares management |
Bundling | Pre-laced cable sets so one pick equals one link group on your assembly line |
Packaging | Kitted packing aligned to your CM's build stations, reducing line-side sorting time |
Send your routing sketch or connector list with an inquiry and the engineering team responds with a feasibility answer and a quote, not a form to fill in.
Yes. The 8-way interface follows the industry-standard footprint, so it is a genuine second source rather than a single-vendor commitment.
Stay within the bend radius printed on the cable jacket. Bending tighter — especially right at the strain relief boot — is the fastest way to turn a good pair into a marginal one.
It is the standard catalog length for this configuration. Other lengths are built to order with a short engineering cycle.
Prototype quantities are produced as samples first, so you can validate fit on real hardware before committing to production volumes. Confirm current MOQ with the sales team when you submit your drawing or spec.
Yes. Length, batch, and customer part-number marking can be added at production, which keeps field replacement fast and unambiguous.
