GA-p55a-ud4p mobo, RAID 0, Radeon 5850 at 8x bottleneck

[BillAnderson702]

Hi I have the ga-p55a-ud4p Gigabyte mobo and I currently have a Radeon 5850. I play first person shooter games on my pc and do word processing, media viewing, etc. . I don't have RAID 0 set up right now, but I know my mobo is capable of it but the pci-e slot will go from 16x to 8x speed.

I have heard that the better the graphics card is the more noticible difference this slower speed will make. Even if the bottleneck doesn't effect me now, I will likely upgrade my graphics card eventually.

Could someone explain (or provide a link) the difference in a graphics card running at 8x as apposted to the standard 16x? Will the reduction just be in frames per second or will something else about it suffer? I really would like to try my first RAID 0 setup ever, but I don't want to make a mistake on a purchase. If my computer is best with a single HD, then I'll just deal with the HD speed and buy a single SSD when they come down in price.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

B. Anderson

 

[mindless728]

the linke speed is the only thing affected, x8 is half of x16 speed, however the 5850 doesn't fully saturate the x16 link and barely saturates the x8, expect maybe a 2% drop in performance that you probably wouldn't notice anyways

 

[roonj]

From what I read that board should work at 16x with just one video card while maintaining sata3 and usb3. Should be in 1st pcix slot, don't own the board so can't tell you if there's a neccessary bios setting. It did say if you use 2nd pcix slot the card would run at 8x and reduce usb to 2.0 and sata to 2.0 due to limited xpress lanes. As Mindless says 2% is typical which would scale with video quality as you mentioned. Any chance power supply is weak or card just needs reseating?
Read your info again guess I missed the point, Guess you're saying using raid will cause the 16x to drop to 8x, if so where did you read that please?