H264 Acceration Performance with PCI-E x4 slot?

[Pluto]

I just found out the board I picked up for a friend's HTPC system has a PCI-E graphics slot which is limited to x4 bandwidth. He eventually wants to upgrade from the onboard video to a card that supports H264 acceleration in hardware. He won't be gaming the system at all.... How much impact is this PCI-E slot limitation going to really have?

 

[Matthias99]

I doubt it will be a big deal. PCIex1 is around 1GBps IIRC. Even high-bitrate 1080p HD content is something like 50Mbps, so it's not like there won't be enough bandwidth to stream the compressed video to the GPU.