RX460 in pcie 1.1 x8 bottleneck?

[nickmania]

Guys at shaphire puts only 8 pins in the pcie connector so I am running the card in this slow bus and cropped at half, 8 instead 16 lanes, the speed is 4GB/s I have checked in Wikipedia.

do you think I would get any performance penalty?

Computer is old, is a q6600 666 MHz dual channel ram with an ssd

 

[jtvang125]

Doubt a rx460 is saturating the pcie bus even at 1.1 and 8x.

 

[SPBHM]

I see a potential bottleneck, but, your CPU is probably going to be by far the more limiting factor.

it would be an interesting thing to test with updated games and also, with 2GB vs 4GB of vram.

 

[nickmania]

mine is 2gb version. do not know why saphire has do this. is any free benchmark I could use to test it?

 

[SPBHM]

mine is 2gb version. do not know why saphire has do this. is any free benchmark I could use to test it?

I don't think there is any easy way to test it, I mean you can test the speed of the PCIE, but not really easily how much it's limiting performance in gaming without comparing it with faster PCIE speeds

if you just want to see speed, if you download AIDA64 (there is a trial version) and run the GPGPU test, the memory read/write speed should be limited by the PCIE bus and give an idea (there are probably better tests, but it's one I use as a reference for me)

now for gaming, the best I can do is to give you some links like:

x4 2.0 and x8 1.1 are basically the same speed
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Intel/Ivy_Bridge_PCI-Express_Scaling/
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_5870_PCI-Express_Scaling/
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GTX_480_PCI-Express_Scaling/
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pci-express-scaling-p67-chipset-gaming-performance,2887-9.html (I think these are all 2.0 results so the x4 is what you should look at no x8)

as you can see on most games it didn't show much of a difference, but there are a few cases... and as I said, you can't be sure about every new game and game scenario not being limited by it... as I said I think your CPU is more of a problem than the PCIE speed bus.

as for why Sapphire did this, good question, I think at the end of the day they save a little money and they feel like x8 is enough, but they are probably thinking more that most people will use x8 2.0 and 3.0