Bandwith requirements of modern cards

[fjsc3]

Hi all,
although reviews usually give a figure for the max theoretical bandwidth required by a graphics card, I'd like to know how many PCI-E lanes does a midrange card eat up - e.g. a Radeon hd4670.

The reason for asking this is simple: my motherboard has a 965p chipset, so it only supports one 16x and the other PCI-E can only work at 4x I believe. So, could I use two hd4670 concurrently at full speed? If not, then how about an asymetric setup, like say hd4550+hd4670?

cheers

 

[TemjinGold]

x4 is really bad for cards since you have pci-e 1.0 and not 2.0. Generally x8/x8 is fine.

I'm assuming you're asking because you already have a 4670. If you need more juice, I would just sell the card and get a better one. You'll get much better performance that way.

 

[fjsc3]

no, the reason for wanting more than 1 card is that I have 3 monitors lying around, so I might just as well use them. That would require 2 cards.

Gaming is not something I do (at all), and the reason for mentioning the hd46xx is that those are the cheapest, fairly energy-efficient cards with dual DVI-D connections. Most other cards have DVI+VGA.

Since Gigabyte mentions that if one PCI-E slot is used at 16x, the other works at 4x, does that mean that it can do 8x+8x? And would the 8x be enough for each hd4670 then?

 

[Lonyo]

If you are just going to run two cards for more monitors, might as well buy a cheaper card like an HD4350 to put in the second slot, and there will also be no worries at all about speed since it's not going to be worked particularly hard.
(http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16814125251 HDMI + DVI means you should be able to use an HDMI -> DVI adapter)

 

[TemjinGold]

If you don't game at all, the lanes don't matter at all.

 

[cusideabelincoln]

Should work fine in the 4x slot.

 

[ilkhan]

just a reminder that its probably a physical x4 slot, so you'll want to make sure the end isn't capped and theres nothing beyond the slot that would prevent the rest of the GPU connectors from hitting something. Almost cards are physically x16, doesn't mean that they need all that bandwidth to run properly (they'll run fine with a x1 slot), they just need to fit in the slot. And yes, as long as its just for secondary monitors and not for gaming, any number of lanes are just fine.

 

[fjsc3]

thanks for all the replies.

The slots are both physically the same and fit 16x cards. The motherboard is a Gigabyte 965P-DS4.