Motherboard Video card and processor help

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
U

USagent

Reputable
Dec 31, 2014
4
0
4,510
I have a MSI 970A-G45 main board, I also have a AMD 955 black edition CPU, and a Asus 660 TI video card. While this works its not as good as it could be. I am thinking about a new CPU ----> (AMD FX-6300 Vishera 6-Core 3.5GHz (4.1GHz Turbo) Socket AM3+ 95W Desktop Processor FD6300WMHKBOX) and different Video Card because of the speed and graphics. I believe my video card while it works and it is new isn't for this board contrary to what I was told. More specific is my concern on this is the PCI express 3.0 x 16 for this card and the mother board I think is a 2.0 x 16. http://us.msi.com/product/mb/970AG45.html#hero-specification The reason I suspect this is a problem and its not utilizing the card properly is that I had a sapphire Radon 5750 1gig card and didn't notice any difference in graphics in ARMA3 and I was trying to help a friend with his and noticed this about mine. Any Help with the Processor and Video card is appreciated.
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
Xyos

Xyos

Distinguished
Oct 5, 2009
631
1
19,360
Plugging a card into a 2.0 PCIe slot makes no difference. The PCIe 2.0 lane with a single GPU is not even close to being fully saturated/used. There is literally no performance difference (well technically benchmarks have been done, its about 0.5 of a single FPS in game performance difference).
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
U

USagent

Reputable
Dec 31, 2014
4
0
4,510


Uh ok Im not following what your saying or am I? are you saying that the 660ti should improve performance or performance will remain the same due to the PCIe 2.0 because the pipe line is too narrow?

laymen s terms please
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
U

USagent

Reputable
Dec 31, 2014
4
0
4,510


Memory band width? are you saying that its too narrow and needs a 3.0 Mother board?
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
U

USagent

Reputable
Dec 31, 2014
4
0
4,510


Ok That makes sense to me, I appreciate the clarity. From both you guys.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Xyos

Xyos

Distinguished
Oct 5, 2009
631
1
19,360


Just to clarify here you will NOT see faster speeds with PCIe 3.0. Think if the PCIe lane as a tube with water going through it. The Tube is the PCI lane, and water is the data.

A graphics card sends data (water) through the tube. It only fills the tube up like 1/4 of the way. There is plenty of space. All PCIe 3.0 does is make the tube bigger for more water. PCIe 2.0 was never even close to being "filled up", hence it is not "saturated".

The best answer here is misleading. The only way you will see "better speeds" is if the PCIe 2.0 lane is fully saturated, which the answer is never (unless you are using a dual GPU card they come close to full saturation like the gtx 690).
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Xyos

Xyos

Distinguished
Oct 5, 2009
631
1
19,360


This is completely incorrect and false. Stop giving out false information. Here is actual stats and benchmarks of 2.0 vs 3.0, literally no difference:

http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Impact-of-PCI-E-Speed-on-Gaming-Performance-518/#Conclusion

Here is their conclusion quoted re-iterating what I said:

Our testing has pretty clearly shown that for gaming using either PCI-E 2.0 or PCI-E 3.0 will give you nearly identical performance. Oddly, in some benchmarks PCI-E 2.0 was actually faster than PCI-E 3.0. At the same time, x16 was not consistantly faster than x8. Again, x8 was actually faster than x16 in many cases. So unless you care about getting up to 1.5 FPS better performance, you might actually want to manually set your video cards to operate at x8 speeds - although we really would not recommend doing so.

This isn't to say that PCI-E 3.0 is not faster than PCI-E 2.0, or that x16 is the same as x8, but rather that current video cards and games are simply not able to utilize the additional bandwidth they provide. In fact, we recently showed that the performance of a Xeon Phi card is greatly reduced if you run it at x8 speeds in the blog post Performance of Xeon Phi on PCIe x8.

While we recommend using the latest PCI-E revision whenever possible, if your motherboard or video card only supports PCI-E 2.0 our results show that this really is not a problem. At the same time, if you want to install a sound card into your Z87 system but doing so would limit your video card to x8 speeds, that is also not a very big problem. At most you may see ~1.5 FPS drop in performance, but that change is so small that it is very unlikely to ever be noticeable.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom