8800GT on PCIe x8 (1.1), speed penalty?

Hi, I am going to be using 2x 3870s in a P5W DH Deluxe and will have the same 8x8 for my cards. I haven't found any info that says "Yes 8x is fine" but every time I look for info everyone says that todays GPUs don't use the full potential of PCI-E 1.1. The way I reason it out is that the HD2900 has the most bandwidth of any card(~105G/s) and at the time they it came out and the Crossfire benchmarks were done the only choice was 8x8 so if they weren't bottlenecked then the 3870(~72G/s) and 8800GT should have no problem.

I don't think you'll be able to tell the difference between 16x and 8x. There have been some good articles written on this; I would suggest a little google action.

^^Seconded.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/03/27/pci_express_scaling_analysis/index.html

I didn't THINK I'd see a bottleneck on the bus. Most cards aren't using more than 10-11x bandwidth to my knowledge. Most stay below 8x. So yeah...

It's just odd that Crysis now runs smoothly at 1024x768 high options, but Shattrath City in WoW still lags me to 15fps...

Well I've never played WOW but with that GPU any slow downs will be caused by your CPU.

Are you playing Wow online? Maybe it's a connection thing, not the video card. Just guessing...

Well he said his FPS dropped to 15 which is a hardware problem not connection. I can play Hellgate and FEAR online with >60 fps but lag out due to my Dial-up.

yeah, it's that my performance is worse with the new card. my connection is great. and yeah, i know my cpu is a bottleneck, but it shouldn't make a better card worse than a worse card, know what i mean? it's baffling.

also, i know WoW isn't a very graphically intense game, but the workload should scale up to the new card's architecture. it there's an issue with the new DX10 architectures not performing optimally under DX9, perhaps i could see a problem, but i don't know of any.

Maybe you're hitting some bug in WoW or in the nVidia drivers. Try changing some video settings in WoW.