PCI-E 1 vs PCI-E 2 - 4870

[Nvmftw]

Does a PCI-E 1 motherboard bottleneck a 4870?
Are there any benchmarks out there that test this or do you have a view on this subject?

I have no idea how this works so thank you in advance



EDIT: Im not going to get over a resolution of 1680, other specs:

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400
OCZ DDR2 PC2-6400 Titanium 4GB Edition Dual Channel
Samsung Spinpoint F HD642JJ 640Gb 16Mb
Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 512MB
Zalman ZM600-HP 600W

 

[swifty_morgan]

pci-e 1 and pci-e 2 and 8x slots and 16x slots are, IMO, just marketing ploys. That card will run fine.

 

[jitpublisher]

PCI 2.0 cards are backwards compatible with all version 1.0a PCIe slots, and almost all PCIe 1.0 slots.
There have only been a very few problems with some of the earliest PCIe version 1.0 boards and I believe it was even then only with SIS chipsets.

 

[enewmen]

I want to know the same thing.
I have a PCIe 1.0 16x now and thinking of getting a killer 4870 X2 or newer/faster GPU. I'll rather not upgrade the motherboard to PCIe 2.0 just to get a new video card.
I know this kind of test was done before showing no difference. Just checking if anything changed in the past couple of years.
Thanks!

 

[chookman]

If you were running the card at 8x instead of 16x youd see a difference, but not much between 2.0 and 1.1 16x slots.

 

[Dr_Ripper]

You know that you made absolutely no sense Chookman. 8x and 16x are all relative to the pci-express slot you are using. pci-express 2.0 has got just as many physical lanes in the slot as pci-express 1.1, only 2.0 has double the bandwidth of 1.1. What it means is each physical lane in 2.0 can transport double the data of each physical lane in 1.1.

So running a pci-e card 2.0 in 1.1 will halve the total bandwidth the card can use with the motherboard to access the cpu and ram. But this all depends on whether the card utilizes that bandwidth capacity of 2.0. If not then there is no gain with 2.0 over 1.1.

As a ruled of thumb, 4870 512mb pci-E 1.1 will run the same as 2.0 in every game except Flight simulator with a small 20-25% boost.

HD 4870 X2 2gb will see a huge performance boost in every game with pci-E 2.0 over pci-E 1.1. I know this because i own both a 4870X2 and the 4870 512mb. I upgraded to pci-E 2.0 2 weeks after playing with my X2.

 

[Grimmy]

Just other people trying to figure out the same thing:

##testing## pci-e 2.0 X16 vs. pci-e 2.0 X8

The a url from there:

HD 4870 CF on P35 -- P45 --X48 Chipset - OCF Testing

My guess that the 2.0 would shine more when CF or SLI configurations, rather then single card. Hoping to get a 4870 X2 on my P35 DFI MB to see what it can chew up.

But I'll prolly stay low fer now and see would comes up on the table next year.

 

[keyter]

I need to know - i have a Radeon 4870 1G, and a Biostar TF570 Sli mobo with 2 X PCI-E x16 1.0a slots. Specs state a "maximum theoretical realized bandwith of 4GB/s per direction, for an aggregate of 8GB/s totally" on the PCI-e x16.

The 4870 specs states a memory frequency of 3.6GB/s (900MHz). Will this mean that the 4870 will run at optimum bandwidth in my board, or do I need to compare the PCIe speed with another bandwidth rating on the card?

And will my benches improve if I install Vista with DX10? My specs are below.

AMD 5400+ BE @ 3gHz
Biostar TF570 Sli
Radeon 4870 1G
Samsung 2232GW @ 1680x1050
Corsair TX650
OCZ Reaper DDR2-1066 2 X 1G @ 420MHz
Win XP 32 SP2