MSI Z270 Gaming Pro Carbon - Graphics card in the 2nd PCI slot?

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Netherspark

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Feb 11, 2016
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I've just bought the Z270 Pro Carbon motherboard, the one with all the RBG elements in it. But when I put my graphics card in the top PCI slot it covers some of the lighting. So I'd prefer to put it in the 2nd slot instead...

I know that on most motherboards the 2nd PCI slots generally have fewer "lanes" and would lower performance to put a single card there, but from what I can make out from the Z270 spec sheet all three slots are x16 (16 lanes). So would it then be possible to have a single graphics card on the 2nd slot, without losing perfomance?

specs here:
https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/Z270-GAMING-PRO.html#productSpecification-section

It does specifically say that there are three PCI-Ex16 slots.

Am I right in this then?
 
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raisonjohn
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Compuser10165

Compuser10165

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Sep 12, 2015
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In your case, there would be no performance penalty. Even with a gtx 1080 there is no performance penalty (my guess). With sth like a Radeon Pro Duo There would be a performance penalty.
 
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raisonjohn

raisonjohn

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The three PCIe3.0 x16 slots of your motherboard are all physically x16's (x16/x16/x16, physical), but, electronically, they would only run in either x16/x0/x4 or x8/x8/x4. This means that the top slot will run at x16 if the second x16 slot is not populated. If the second x16 slot is populated, both the top slot and the second slot will run in x8. The third slot will always run at x4.

A PCIe3.0 x16 has a theoretical bandwidth of 15,760 MB/s, a PCIe3.0 x8 is half of x16 or 7,880 MB/s, while a PCIe3.0 x4 is half of x8 or 3,940 MB/s.

Plugging the GPU on the 2nd slot will decrease the max. bandwidth from ~15.8GB/s to ~7.9GB/s due to how your motherboard's lanes were designed.

In real-world gaming, you will not notice significant difference (only a ~1fps or less average, probably, depending on the game) between the GPU performance plugged on the 1st slot (in x16 speeds) compared to plugging it on the 2nd slot (in x8 speeds), as the GPU cannot use up all bandwidth of a PCIe3.0 x16.
http://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/2488-pci-e-3-x8-vs-x16-performance-impact-on-gpus
[video="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJuj16gRoBI"][/video]
 
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