PCI Express Woes

[cewhidx]

Ok, I have a new EVGA GTX 470 that just replaced an older EVGA GTX 260. Since installing the new card, GPUZ, CPUID, & Everest are all reporting that my PCI express 2.0 x16 is @ 2.0 x2. I havent really noticed any trouble with games, but my windows experience index went down, as well as 3D Mark scores for the GPU. These numbers should go up right....lol

Anyway Specs are:
ASUS M3N72-D Motherboard
AMD Phenom II X4 965 BE (stock speed)
8 GB OCZ Reaper HPC DDR2
EVGA GTX 470 (stock speed)
Antec 850w PSU
Windows 7 x64
Antec 1200 full tower

Also as a side note, I have all power save options set to performance just to rule that out. All drivers are up to date & installed correctly.
I'm sure that I'm just not fully understanding how PCIE works or I'm missing something, but I thought I'd check with all you guys that know this kind of stuff just to be on the safe side. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

 

[jyjjy]

Reseating the card may help. Give it a few tries. Also perhaps a BIOS update. Failing that I would contact ASUS and ask them what's up.

 

[COLGeek]

BTW, when you upgraded from the 260 to the 470, did you update the drivers as well?

When you reseat the GPU, make sure it firmly "clicks" into place. Good luck!!!

 

[cewhidx]

Yeah I tried reseating the card, but it's still the same. I also used driver sweeper in safe mode to remove the old drivers & installed the newest ones from Nvidia's site, so that rules that out. I'll try contacting Asus to see what they say, but I have a feeling that with the motherboard being 2 years old & way past the warrenty, I'll end up having to buy a new one.
Also I had to make sure I had the newest BIOS when I upgraded my cpu to the Phenom, so that's all good too.
I really appreciate the responses...

 

[COLGeek]

Don't rush out yet to buy a new mobo. Couple things to check. I see that your mobo supports hybrid SLI. Is that feature enabaled in the BIOS? If so, turn it off.

Also since your system has 2 PCI-E 2.0 x16 slots, which slot are you using and is there anything in the other x16 slot? You should be using the blue slot as your primary GPU x16 slot.

Good luck!!!

 

[cewhidx]

Well, Hybrid SLI will only enable if there is a discreet card present that supports it, but I'll check again just to be certain. Also I am using the blue slot, however I did try to use the other one to see if there was a difference but it wouldnt boot up with that one used & nothing in the blue slot. I'm not using the black one for anything now, but I have used it in the past to sli two 8600 gts cards a couple years ago & everything worked fine. Also I'm not having any frame rate drops as a result of this issue, so I'm not even sure that what these applications are reporting is even accurate. It just seemed to me that when all of them were reporting it at x2 vice x16 that maybe something was up.

 

[COLGeek]

What does the Nvidia Control Panel report the settings as?

 

[cewhidx]

I cant seem to find where it's listed in the Nvidia control panel

 

[COLGeek]

With the Nvidia Control Panel open, try under Help and then System Information. You should get a window that shows your GPU info. The PCI-E bus info will be near the bottom of the list (if like the system I just looked at).

 

[cewhidx]

The only thing relating to PCIE is the bus frequency which is 2500.00 MHZ
There is nothing on the page displaying the Link width. However I did hear back from EVGA & they suggested an RMA of the card. So I've sent it back & am awating replacement. On a side note I have my old 260 in at the moment & now the PCIe is at x16 linke it should be, so I'm fairly convinvced that it was the card's fault.