Can you use a PCI 2.0 16x graphics card with a PCI 8x Mother board

[Sam85]

Hello,
I just purchased an EVGA P55V 120-LF-E651-TR LGA Mother board and an EVGA 01G-P3-1158-TR graphics card. I was told by EVGA tech support that the two products were compatible, but after assembling my PC the monitor receives no signal from either of the DVI ports on the card. Is there an issue with using a PCI 2.0 16x card with a PCI 8x Mother Board? Thanks

 

[aznshinobi]

All I can assume is faulty card? The mobo has no problem I've answered this question before. It is just locked at 8x 8x for the other PCI when you SLI to have 8x/8x instead of 16x/16x Both the slots on the board are 8x 2.0 So its defiantly not the board.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtkiffOQ9JA

 

[brianthesnail]

Hi sam
on some motherboards theres a switch card which totally disables the un-used pci-express bus... this will then dedicate the whole 16 lanes to the remaining slot....
this annoyed me when manufactuers released sli/xfire boards with x8 buses... in theory you gaining no extra bandwidth and the only extra performance is the core,shader and memory clock speeds aswell as the extra memory buffer (vram)
i had a similar problem with a asrock board and a radeon x1950pro ... while the board would happily run my XFX GTS250... it refused to support the x1950pro... ..solution ...access bios and check vga support... for some reason my gts250 was running while set to the "pci" option ... i changed this to "pci-express" and saved and exited... then accessed the desktop using safe mode>low resolution mode (640x480) .. install drivers and this should sort out the problem
when you experience any display/graphic card problem allways try low resolution mode first... this uses basis "vga drivers" to access the desktop.... this then allows you to install any drivers or diagnose any problems...
hope this helps,any problems let me know
good luck sam !

 

[Sam85]

Yes, the PCI-E power cable is plugged in and my PSU is a 650W unit. I should have mentioned previously that I have no OS installed on the Hard Drive, but I would think that my graphics card would still be able to display the BIOS screen.

 

[Timop]

Is the card in the first or the second slot? Try switching it around.

On the P55V it is dual X8 slots regardless of setup however IIRC, though it is physically X16 slots.