5970 at pci-express x8 lanes OR even more Dremel tool?

midnight growler

Senior member
May 8, 2005
338
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Long story short, a friend of mine (through a sweet IT department job) has a 5970, but literally no machine (big enough) to use it in. Hes offered to let me use it for the time being but Im running into the same problem.

This franken-card is too big to fit into my case, a CM Storm Scout. With my motherboard (Asus M4A79xtd evo) the 16x pci-express slot would align this card into both the bottom of the optical drive bay and the top of the (side-facing) hard drive bay. The lower 8x pci-express slot would provide a more manageable route where I would only have to only Dremel out one side of the hard drive bay.

The problem though is that this motherboard is not an FX chipset and the second slot just has an 8x lane. Its granted that Im not able to take this card anywhere near its limits, but how much is that 8x going to matter? At most I'm going to have a 1900x1200 monitor playing GTA IV and the STALKER games with all the bells and whistles turned up.

Will I be alright with just a little bit of dremel tooling or does this really warrant an ungodly amount of it to get it in the x16 slot?
 

dualsmp

Golden Member
Aug 16, 2003
1,627
45
91
Pretty sure 8x has a minimal impact on performance. Maybe 2 or 3 percent at most.
 

james1701

Golden Member
Sep 14, 2007
1,791
34
91
If the card is loaner, I would not butcher up my case. Just take it out, and run without a case for a while.