I've found some information about using a PCI Express 3.0 card in a PCI Express 2.0 slot, but the articles and answers I have found regarding this topic were very dated. I have an old Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R motherboard in my system with a PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot. Will that be able to run the new AMD Radeon RX 480 card and will I see significant performance degradation over using a motherboard with PCI Express 3.0 slots?
AMD Radeon RX 480 on PCI Express 2.0
- Thread starter Xyon88
- Start date
Odds are the no RX 480 will work in any PCI Express 2.0 Motherboard, due to the motherboard not recognizing the UEFI bios of the RX 480 video card.
Some of the high end motherboards like ASUS do have a work around by enabling a "Legacy" bios function, however you take a huge performance hit in video card and system ram by enabling this function(I had to do this to get a 770 GTX video card with UEFI bios to work on my ASUS motherboard 2 years ago and that was on a Z68 motherboard.....You are talking first generation I7/Xeon cpu with your X58 motherboard. However if you do get the video card to run, and you do not have to enable a "legacy" mode in the bios to do it(which causes a performance hit in video and system memory at least it does on a Z68 gen 2 motherboard.) then you will probably not notice any performance degradation with the RX 480 on a pci express 2 over pci express 3.0 slot. At worst case there could be a 10%-15% hit in high end performace benchmarks....however the biggest problem you are going to have running the card on a First Generation I7/Xeon CPU is this video card will probably bottleneck that processor fairly easily but then again most 780GTX or 980GTX video card would also bottleneck the cpu fairly easily if you could get those to run with a X58 motherboard.
My recommendations is that it is probably time to upgrade your system if you need better video card. I am sorry there is no X58 or socket 1366 motherboard option that has a pci express 3.0 slot...I ended up upgrading my Z68 motherboard to a Z77 version as it was cheaper for me to buy a Z77 and sell my Z68 then it was to buy a Z68 with pci express 3.0.
Some of the high end motherboards like ASUS do have a work around by enabling a "Legacy" bios function, however you take a huge performance hit in video card and system ram by enabling this function(I had to do this to get a 770 GTX video card with UEFI bios to work on my ASUS motherboard 2 years ago and that was on a Z68 motherboard.....You are talking first generation I7/Xeon cpu with your X58 motherboard. However if you do get the video card to run, and you do not have to enable a "legacy" mode in the bios to do it(which causes a performance hit in video and system memory at least it does on a Z68 gen 2 motherboard.) then you will probably not notice any performance degradation with the RX 480 on a pci express 2 over pci express 3.0 slot. At worst case there could be a 10%-15% hit in high end performace benchmarks....however the biggest problem you are going to have running the card on a First Generation I7/Xeon CPU is this video card will probably bottleneck that processor fairly easily but then again most 780GTX or 980GTX video card would also bottleneck the cpu fairly easily if you could get those to run with a X58 motherboard.
My recommendations is that it is probably time to upgrade your system if you need better video card. I am sorry there is no X58 or socket 1366 motherboard option that has a pci express 3.0 slot...I ended up upgrading my Z68 motherboard to a Z77 version as it was cheaper for me to buy a Z77 and sell my Z68 then it was to buy a Z68 with pci express 3.0.
Thanks for the detailed discussion. I figured I'd probably need to upgrade anyways, and it's been almost 6 years so it's probably time. I'll probably get the video card first and try it out before doing a full upgrade. However, it doesn't look like I'll be getting a RX 480 any time soon as I don't see it in stock anywhere.
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