im wondering if you put any pci-express 2.0 vid card in a regular pci-express slot, will the regular slot limit the cards performance?


example:

8800gt pci-e 2.0 vid card
680i sli mobo with pci-e x16 slots (2)

vs this setup:

8800gt pci-e 2.0 vid card
unknown mobo that supports sli with 2x pci-e 2.0 slots


i looked and looked for an sli mobo that had 2x pci-e slots and i only found 1, it was 780i sli mobo but that mobo states its for 3way sli, but it only has 2x pci-e 2.0 slots and 1x pci-e 16x slot.

are we just in a funky time where the mobos havnt kept up with the cards?

Most of the tests of the 8800GT were done on motherboards with PCI-e v1.0 slots & no performance penalty has been noted as a result of such combination. Maybe newer cards will really use the extra bandwidth available by the v2.0 slot but right now that's not the case.

thank you very much for that info.

while i was googling to find the answer before i posted this question, i came across a link that stated something like this "pci-e x32 is soon to be released" have any of you heard anything about this? maybe its just jibberish or maybe not.

That certainly sounds like PCI-e 2.0 which is supposed to double the available bandwidth from the 1.0 specification.

that would make sense.

ok that leads me to one more question.

at tigerdirect, they are pretty good at listing the specs for anything they sell,

here is one line off the evga 8800gts 320mb vid card pci-e 2.0

" Memory Bandwidth: 64GB/sec. "

will it still have the same speed of gb/sec when in a 1.0 board?

Yes

Yes, depending on if the memory speed is the same. Didnt know they made GTS 320's in pci-e 2.0 anyways.

Also a little bit about pci-e 2.0, I beleive as of now and for atleast the next 2 years is a marketing gimic. Right now if you combined 2 8800GTX into 1 card it would still not come close to using the bandwidth of a pci-e 16x slot, probably not even a 8x slot.

your right, was thinking of gt and the other 8800 series.

PCIe 2.0 has problems with some PCIe 1.0 and 1.1a standards. You need PCIe 1.1 or greater for no hassle compatiablility. To use PCIe 2.0, you need an X38 chipset.

The biggest issue however is will your PSU match it?