I agree, risers are the biggest Pain in the @SS! However if you do find quality ones where the SATA to Molex won't melt, they're generally not too bad. For small setup your 4 card setup or maybe a couple of Play pandas are fun and super low maintenance. However it's not cost effective for large farm and is less than ideal for heat management except the lovely Pandas. I'm running a 400 plus GPU farm which would mean that it would be over 100 rigs to manage vs say 57+ x MSI Gaming 5 Rigs. I got my MSI Gaming 5 at fairly cheap at $99-120 when they're on sale or refurb so per dollar average cost per GPU is definitely much cheaper hands down as our MB, SSD,PSU, CPU, RAM, case set adds a lot of cost per rig not to mention licensing cost (ie Awesome miner, ROMs, etc). Yes, I do coin switching but not too much as I try to make specialized groups of cards and ROMs to handle specialized coins (ie 470 for Eth, 480 / Furies for ZEC, etc).
It's definitely a lot of work, hence why great tools such like Simplemining.net, Rig resetters, and especially standardization helps a lot to allow me to do all this as a 1 man show on top of handling a full time IT job. I'm 50% complete with my Data Center farm pumping out over 40 FAT Pandas. Getting ready for the Shed build out to store my open air rigs and legacy rigs type.
My journey documented below for anyone who wants to build a Giant farm at home and want to skip all the growing pain I had to go thru. Much of what I learned is thru this forum and great guys like Phillip among many others Senior members. Just upload a nasty burn from risers per Phil's comment and also reference where you can get good quality risers from our fellow forum member.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.17588677This alone makes the MSI Gaming 5 board worth the price of admission. You can see what card is not seen or is having issues, rather than guess or do trial and error with other boards including ASROCK.