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PCIe x16 vs. PCIe 2.0 x16??

J

JackSpadesSI

Senior member
Can you put a video card with a PCIe 2.0 x16 interface into a motherboard with only a PCIe x16 (not 2.0) slot?

If so, what are the drawbacks (e.g. would it only operate as a non-2.0 card)? Also, are there ANY advantages to doing this (e.g. while slowed down to non-2.0 speeds, the newer and better video card still may have more power than an older card)?

I ask because the slots appear to be the same, physically. Also, you can plug a USB 2.0 device into a USB 1.1 port and it will work fine, albeit at USB 1.1 speeds.
 
Yep they are backwards compatible. There are no real drawbacks from what I can tell. I get the same FPS and everything
 
The difference between PCIe 2.0 and PCIe 1.1 is that the first has double the bandwidth of the second and it can also provide more power to the videocard. The power improvement makes no difference, since your card also has an external power cord from the PSU, or maybe two of them (6+6 pin or 6+8 pin for hungry cards).

The problem comes when you want to use a very powerful card into a PCIe 1.1 slot, since the card is able to move more data then the slot is. So that can transform into a bottleneck and today it only applies to cards from GTX 280 and up. The more powerful the card, the uglier the bottleneck becomes. 4870X2 and GTX 295 are the ones that takes the biggest performance hit. So, if you're not using one of these two, I'd say you're ok. I don't think that even a GTX 280-285 will loose too much performance on a PCIe 1.1 slot, but even a couple of percents matters sometime.
 
Originally posted by: Quizard
Yep they are backwards compatible. There are no real drawbacks from what I can tell. I get the same FPS and everything
Click to expand...

if you are talking PCIe 1.0/1.1 vs PCIe 2.0, the older spec limits video cards of 4870 class - a bit. It gets progressively more limiting with GTX280 and X2/multi-CPU solutions - depending on the game and your settings
 
Question seems to crop up regularly.

Good answers here, worthy of a bump, and possible candidate for sticky.
 
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