Pci-E x16 vs x8....

[Agrippa]

I'm just wondering, purely hypothetically, if a modern gfx card (say an 8800GTX) would actually suffer any performance degradation if installed in an x8 slot? Do they actually require faster than a 2GB/sec link? Anyone tried or know for sure?

 

[Ulfhednar]

I can't be bothered digging up benchmarks, but they are out there.

Basically: -

An 8800GTX suffers in an 8x PCI-E slot but is still playable.

An 8800GTS or anything lower doesn't have a big performance hit.

 

[Matt2]

Doubtful.

I can't speak for the 8800 series, but I know when I ran 7800GT SLI at x8/x8, it wasnt any slower than the benches from the x16/x16 motherboards.

 

[Agentbolt]

I forget what article it was, but the one I read saw no appreciable difference even with a GTX. A few % points loss at most. That could change with R600 or the new NVidia GPUs, of course.

 

[Agrippa]

Cheers guys, much obliged to ya!

 

[geokilla]

Toms Hardware did a comparison between 16X and 8X all the way to 1X. The result were pretty interesting. I can't seem to find the article though.