pcie 2.0 board "bottleneck"?

[AchillesViper]

alright here is my setup
MSI P67a-GD53(B3)
i5 3350p
EVGA 780SC
16GB ddr3
the mobo is only 2.0, the card is 3.0. think thats holding back the system? if not what is?

 

[someguynamedmatt]

No; essentially no consumer products are going to push more than PCIe 2.0 can handle.

Problems start to occur when datacenters and compute clusters start pushing mass amounts of data over networking and storage control cards - I doubt you have to worry about being in one of these situations any time soon. PCIe 3.0 was essentially designed to facilitate more headroom for high-throughput purposes like these.

I don't see anything that would be causing a 'bottleneck' - I'd like to point to that older i5, but it's still putting out more than enough power to run a single 780 at capacity. Your system is fine.

 

[coozie7]

Unless there's a problem with the connection, PCI-E 2.0 is plenty fast enough for a GTX780, grab a freebie of GPUZ or HWinfo and see what the connection type and link speed is. Note most cards downclock when idle, and mine drops from PCI-E 2.0 to 1.1 when unloaded, so check the real numbers by running the GPUZ render test-click on the blue question mark beside the PCI-E info box to run it.
If you're having frame rate issues, specify which game/s are effected, sometimes there's a simple solution.