Questions about PCI-E!

Krispie

Honorable
Sep 18, 2013
28
0
10,530
Hi, from what I've read PCIe 3.0 is backwards compatible to PCIe 2.0. My question is if PCIe 3.0 is backwards compatible even further (back to PCIe 1.0/1.1).

I also have another question. I've googled a lot about my motherboard, but on every website it just says that it has "PCIe x16" it doesn't tell me what version it is. Does this mean it has PCIe 1.0?

My mother board:
MS-7613
( I know it's old and shitty but I'm trying to buy a new graphics card first because I'm in more need of that )

I was planning to buy the graphic card:
ASUS ROG Radeon HD7970 3GB GHz Matrix Platinum Edition (Which requiers PCIe 3.0)
 

CraigN

Distinguished
Yes, it is a PCI-Express slot, so the 3.0 card should work fine. They are backwards compatible to all versions to my knowledge.

Did some googling of my own of your motherboard, but I was only able to find one source (not sure how reliable) that said its actually a PCI-Express 2.0 slot. I looked up the socket type (H57 Express on that board) and the socket supports PCI-E 2.0, so I find it unlikely that the board would be anything less than that, so you should be fine. PCI-E 2.0 is also fast enough that you won't be bottlenecking the card.

Edit:
Found another forum post on another site of someone asking the same question, someone was able to confirm that it's PCI-Express 2.0 using GPU-Z, his old GeForce 260 detected as running on PCI-Express 2.0
 

Eximo

Titan
Ambassador
According to Intel the H57 Express chipset in that board was PCIe 2.0. And yes, a PCIe 1.1/2.0/3.0 are all compatiable. PCIe 1.0 is a bit of a toss up, that was prior to the higher power standards and putting some video cards in the slot may pull too much power. (Not really relevant but interesting)