Video Card in Second PCI-E 16X Slot

[sgt bombulous]

Hello,

This question is very quick. Can I put my video card into the 2nd (Gray) PCIe 2.0 x16 slot of this motherboard and expect it to work at x16?If yes, is there anything special I'll have to do to make it work?

Thank you!

 

[gkay09]

^ NO...the P55 chipsets have limited PCIe lanes...So only about 20 PCIe lanes are allotted to the graphic slots...And in that mobo, when you populated 2 cards, it will operate at x8x8 mode, which is better than other cheaper boards that operate at x16x4 mode when 2 cards are populated...
Only in these P55 boards, can operate 2 cards at x16x16 mode...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131594
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813188058

 

[Maziar]

Hello and welcome to the forums
As gkay said P55 supports SLI/CF at dual 8x mode with the exception of those 2 motherboards.
However if you use single card on a P55 board,it will operate at 16x speed.

 

[sgt bombulous]

Hello and welcome to the forums
As gkay said P55 supports SLI/CF at dual 8x mode with the exception of those 2 motherboards.
However if you use single card on a P55 board,it will operate at 16x speed.

Just to be clear, I only plan to use ONE card, period. My case design is kind of stupid, and the GPU runs into my hard drive bays in the top slot. So, I just want to move it to the 2nd one. If I have to use the top one I still can, but right now I have a rather peculiar rig keeping the 2nd hard drive out of the way.

Thanks again!

 

[sgt bombulous]

In addition to the question above, if I were ever to go SLI (say 2 x GTX260's), how much does the x8 limitation effect this? I'm new to this so this is probably going to sound stupid... But if the slot works at 1/2 speed, what is the advantage in adding the 2nd card? I can only imagine it's not quite this simple.

 

[Bluescreendeath]

Two x8 PCIe 2.0 lanes is totall fine for two GTX260s

The PCIe 2.0 x8 slot only becomes a bottleneck if you're trying to run a 5870 or GTX295 or higher in x8 mode.

 

[sgt bombulous]

Thank you! Now all we need is confirmation that my GTX260 will run in the second PCI x16 slot at x16. At the moment, only ONE video card, doing this for space reasons.

Thank you!

 

[Bluescreendeath]

Yes. 1 GPU will run in x16 mode, 2 GPUs will run in x8 mode.