GTX 670 in PCIe 1.0

[pnorris]

I asked last week for help regarding putting a 670 in a 6 year old Dell computer and said that I'd post some results. (Upgraded the psu also.)

The Dell XPS 410 has no problem with the EVGA GTX 670. I had a 8800 GTS 512 in there before. The cpu is a E6600. My resolution in 1920 x 1200.

As far as the limit from the interface, it is really hard to say. I don't have a bevy of games to benchmark but can comment on NWN and NWN2.

NWN: 50 fps seems to be about max--probably due to it being opengl 1.4

NWN2 shows a lot of improvement. With all settings maxed, instead of something just above medium, fps range from 35-125 instead of 20-75--outdoors. It seems to depend on how many characters are in the scene to some extent, but based on what others have said, the processor may be playing a big part of the outcome. I have no idea if the pcie 1.0 is limiting, but I hope that it is.

Thanks again for the input. When I build a new computer in several months, I post again the difference with pcie 3.0.

 

[toyota]

your cpu is by far the main limitation. there is no way you can do a comparison to 3.0 because you will have a modern computer then compared to what you have now.

 

[borisvodofsky]

your cpu is by far the main limitation. there is no way you can do a comparison to 3.0 because you will have a modern computer then compared to what you have now.

They've shown in benchmarks that PCIE 2.0 at 4x is where you get Major performance hits.

PCIE 1.0 16x is PCIE 2.0 8x, So the op's right in that there' is little to none performance hit due to the connection.


HOWEVER, you're right that the e6600 is in fact a bottleneck in CPU dependent games, such as starcraft 2.

I'd say that 670 is limited to 60% - 75% of it's full potential. So, that's perfectly fine for most games. ^_^

 

[toyota]

They've shown in benchmarks that PCIE 2.0 at 4x is where you get Major performance hits.

PCIE 1.0 16x is PCIE 2.0 8x, So the op's right in that there' is little to none performance hit due to the connection.


HOWEVER, you're right that the e6600 is in fact a bottleneck in CPU dependent games, such as starcraft 2.

I'd say that 670 is limited to 60% - 75% of it's full potential. So, that's perfectly fine for most games. ^_^

actually a 670 is not even going to be 50% utilized in most games with an E6600.

 

[The_Golden_Man]

Even my Q9650@4GHz bottlenecks my MSI GTX 670 pretty severe in some games. The Witcher 2 dips down to 60% GPU utilization (When that happens FPS is dropping to the 40's) in this system with everything maxed out (Except Uber Sampling Disabled) in 1080dpi. While in my Sandy system it is pretty much pegged at 99% GPU utilization (60FPS + all the time) all the time.

That said, one could easily imagine a E6600 would destroy the whole purpose of a GTX 670. A major bottleneck will occur.

Edit: In that same spot where the Q9650@4GHz setup fell down to about 60% + GPU usage my 2600K@4.4GHz also fell down to about 70% GPU usage when using GTX 670 SLI (With one card it was about 98 - 99% usage). So a overclocked Sandybridge Actually bottlenecks two of these cards a bit.