well i've been assured my mobo runs a bandwidth of x8 instead of x16 even though its a x16 slot. i've also been told there is little difference between them, so i was wondering if getting an 8600 or maybe even an 8800 will run okay with my system. its an Nvidia 6100m-m mobo and im currently using an x1900gt which is working great right now

i think u r wrong, if the slot is 16x , then the card will run @ 16x

I just ran into the same thing, my DFI inifinty SLI mobo dosent have a 16x mode, so when I though I was upgrading from a 7900gt to an x1900xtx I saw I huge performance drop. I'd say if you're lucky enough to have it working ok, wait and upgrade both mobo and video card at the same time.

From the ECS 6100M-M motherboard specification sheet:

Linkage
So depending on which motherboard the OP has (s/he never specified), it's obvious that a x16 slot can (and is) scaled back to x8.

Tom's Hardware PCI-E Scaling Analysis

Happy reading.

-Wolf sends

8800gts+ and it loses performance.

im aware that its scaled back and the thing is i cant change it, its stuck there at x8 but i was wondering if using a high end video card will still work, and to hatman, are you saying im able to use the 8800gts? i no already if i can that it will drop in performance

bump, can someone just answer the question plz..

Read the link that Wolfshadw provided about PCIe scaling. If its the article that I remember, the answer is kinda. Synthetic benchmarks will notice the lack of bandwidth, but real games shouldn't see any slowdown with it at 8x. There will be some limiting in some situations, but overall you shouldn't see many issues. The 8800s are much more powerful then your x1900GT, your FPS should go up.

Not true. A PCIe 16x slot can have up to 16 lanes of PCIe bandwidth attached to it. It could have as few as 1, or the limit of 16. Motherboard manufacturers should put nothing but 16x slots on their motherboards, as any PCIe card would then work in any slot, and would simply use whatever bandwidth it had.

Have you never seen the Asrock boards that let you chose between running an AGP or PCIe card? When these first came out, they had a 16x slot, but had only four lanes attached to it. (again, if the linked article is the one I'm remembering, they used this board so they could measure 4x performance.)

Yes, it will work.

ok cool thnx, so im assuming an 8800 for example, would work just fine. now i just have to save up for it, or possibly wait for the 9 series?

no one knows exactly when Geforce 9 series will come out , get a 8800GTX and enjoy