Geforce 660ti able to run on PCIe 2.0? Should it??

[Tobolo]

I'm pretty new to the video card upgrade scene and I wanted some expert advice on this. The other threads didn't really tell me what I needed to know.

Basically, I want to upgrade my video card (IFRC I have a Radeon HD 5350 right now). I cannot truly play computer games as Portal 2 is a test in patience and Warcraft runs at 9FPS.

I have a PCIe 2.0 x16 slot with that little slot situated above it. A friend has recommended the 660ti that he says runs on a 2.0 slot without a problem. Should I listen to him? Anyone have a better recommendation?

Thanks for your help!

Tl;dr Will a GeForce 660ti run on a PCIe 2.0 x16 or not? If not, whats a good card to use?

 

[Smoblikat]

PCi-e Is cool in the sense that you can take a PCI-e 3.0 X16 card and run it in a PCI-e 1.0 X1 slot. There is no configuration where it wont work, so to answer your question yes it can and will run in a 2.0 slot with little to no performance drop. I would recommend looking into an HD7870 instead though.

 

[MrWizzard]

Yes it will run fine. Go buy it!

 

[hokies83]

Yeah it will run fine.. there is only a 1-2fps diff between pci-e 3.0 and 2.0 at sub tri displays and 1 gpu... And maybe 400 points in 3d mark 11.

 

[Tobolo]

Thanks for your prompt help! I ordered it off amazon with one day shipping, so hopefully tomorrow night I shall be gaming in all its wonderful glory (free copy of Borderlands 2 as well!).

 

[Red Hawk]

Basically, I want to upgrade my video card (IFRC I have a Radeon HD 5350 right now).

No such thing, I think you mean either a 4350 or 5450. Both about the same.

Anyways, the answer is yes, a 660 Ti will work in a PCI-e 2.0 16x slot. That's a bit of the beauty of the PCI-e slot series -- they increase bandwidth generationally while maintaining backwards compatibility. I think you could even put a PCI-e 3.0 card into a PCI-e 1.0 slot and it would still work. The difference between each generation of PCI-e is that the next generation has twice the bandwidth of the last. The 660 Ti probably isn't powerful enough to where you would start bottlenecking at the PCI-e slot; you would only have to worry about that if you started using SLI or CrossfireX or dual GPUs.

 

[Tobolo]

No such thing, I think you mean either a 4350 or 5450. Both about the same.

Anyways, the answer is yes, a 660 Ti will work in a PCI-e 2.0 16x slot. That's a bit of the beauty of the PCI-e slot series -- they increase bandwidth generationally while maintaining backwards compatibility. I think you could even put a PCI-e 3.0 card into a PCI-e 1.0 slot and it would still work. The difference between each generation of PCI-e is that the next generation has twice the bandwidth of the last. The 660 Ti probably isn't powerful enough to where you would start bottlenecking at the PCI-e slot; you would only have to worry about that if you started using SLI or CrossfireX or dual GPUs.

I believe it was the 4350, I know it wasn't the 5450. I wasn't sure but I figured everyone would get the gist.

 

[Tweak155]

A PCIe 2.0 slot will not bottleneck a 660ti. It might even be hard pressed to bottleneck a 680. The PCIe revisions are coming out well ahead of taking advantage of the existing revision, as it should.

 

[pantsaregood]

PCI-E 1.0 won't bottleneck a 680.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Intel/Ivy_Bridge_PCI-Express_Scaling/23.html

I guess you could call a 5% performance loss a bottleneck, but I'd say it is pretty negligible. PCI-E 1.0 x8 loses 12% performance - that's kind of funny when you realize that AGP x8 provided the same bandwidth.

The only cards that PCI-E 1.0 could potentially choke are those that use two GPUs.

 

[nenforcer]

1 x PCI-E 2.0 x16 = 1 x PCI-E 3.0 x8

not a huge loss there.

 

[Tobolo]

Got the card in and have it installed. I about cried when I saw the size of it. Ended up not being able to plug my optical drives and my memory card reader back in.

Played Portal 2 very briefly and it looked a lot better. Going to need to mess with the settings. Tried playing WoW but the patch hit today and its still optimizing. Hopefully I will get a good frame rate and I will report back!