Would a PCI-E x16 card (GTX 770 specifically) Work on a PCIE-X1 slot?

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rowlands111

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Hello,

I have an Acer desktop. It came built with a GTX 770 2GB. According to Speccy, by Piriform, it has one free PCI-E x1 slot available (well it has 2 actually) as the motherboard only has one x16 slot which is of course in use.

Do you think it would be suitable to run a second GTX 770 2GB in the PCI-E x1 slot??

Finally, the machine has a 500w supply; Unsure if for SLI it would need a bigger PSU.

Thanks in Advance Tom's Hardware users for any insights.

E. Rowlands
 
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marshal11

marshal11

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Your PSU isn't big enough. For 2 GTX 770s, you'll want at least 650w. Yes, running it in a PCIe x1 slot would be compatible. However, even if you did have a bigger PSU, that you lower your gaming performance massively. You will only be getting 1/16th of the bandwidth it needs, so the second card would be miles behind your first card, causing your game to run like absolute crap. If you want more performance, you should look into overclocking if you haven't already as overclocking and yield very impressive gains.
 
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Joseph DeGarmo

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If you want full performance of running two GTX 770s in SLI, then you will need an LGA 2011 motherboard and at least an i7-4820k CPU since the X79 chipset supports up to 40 PCI-E lanes, as opposed to 16 PCI-E lanes in LGA 1150 / 1155 motherboards. But if your PC is still under warranty, then you should hold off on such upgrades until the end of your warranty.
 
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marshal11

marshal11

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That's bologne. You can run 2x770s without issue a x8 speeds without losing performance at all. That's the same speed as PCIe 2.0 at x16 speeds which is still enough for the highest end cards. GTX 770s don't use even close to that bandwidth.

EDIT: You're thinking of 3 way SLI/CFx, otherwise you're massively misinformed.
 
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marshal11

marshal11

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It is below the recommendation of 600W, however those are largely exaggerated to ensure compatibility with even the oldest crappiest PSUs out there.
 
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rowlands111

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I can't stress enough on how helpful those replies have been.

Thank you.

Joseph Degarmo and Marshal11 I appreciate your insights.

Selecting best answer for Marshal as his answer gives me some hope for SLI in the future - although I've taken on board the PSU issue and warranty upgrade scenario etc :))

 
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rowlands111

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Haha, fair one. But no, here's me specs from Speccy -

Operating System
Windows 8.1 64-bit
CPU
Intel Core i7 4770 @ 3.40GHz 26 °C
Haswell 22nm Technology
RAM
16.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 799MHz (11-11-11-28)
Motherboard
Acer Predator G3-605 (LGA1150) 28 °C
Graphics
G246HL (1920x1080@60Hz)
2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 (Sapphire/PCPartner) 31 °C
Storage
1863GB Seagate ST2000DM001-1CH164 (SATA) 35 °C
Optical Drives
HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GT90N
Audio
Realtek High Definition Audio


 
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rowlands111

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Just to clarify, from the information, I actually will not be using SLI - I wouldn't fancy a £250 card throttling my other £250 card, all for the sake of having two GPUs.
Will stick with 1 gpu and try to overclock some more - managed to get an extra 100mhz out of the core clock, and an extra 200mhz out of the memory using Afterburner. After a heck of a lot of research, that seemed to be a stable limit. It got the machine an extra 5-7fps on the recomended heaven benchmark which is fair!

Guys, thanks again. Issue clarified.
 
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