An PCI Express 3.0 card on a PCIe 1.1 slot - compatible? Performance?

[JoshuaTheGrizzly]

Hi there. I recently aquired a cheap motherboard (with a Q6600 on top of it, as well as some 4gb memory) and I am looking for a graphics card to use it with it. Recently, I choose the 7770, as it is available for the same price as the 6850 in my country yet draws less power (Power supply is 480 watts, and part of the same deal which gave me the motherboard). So I have a good card with future potential which should not blow my current setup.

However, the 7770 is PCI express 3.0. My motherboard has PCI express 1.1 (Its an Asus p5.. something, I don't have it with me at the moment), there are two questions:

1) Will there be compatability issues? Perhaps the bios might not support 3.0 architectures?
2) Will there be a significant loss of performance IE will the 1.1 slot actually bottleneck my card?

 

[Pinhedd]

There should be no compatibility issues. There may be some issues with cards that have the older 1.0a specification but 1.1 should be fine.

As for performance, it would not be noticeable with a 7770 so long as you use a 16x slot.

 

[Guest]

PCI Express 3.0

PCI Express 3.0 Base specification revision 3.0 was made available in November 2010, after multiple delays. In August 2007, PCI-SIG announced that PCI Express 3.0 would carry a bit rate of 8 gigatransfers per second (GT/s), and that it would be backwards compatible with existing PCIe implementations.

there will be no measurable FPS difference @ x16:

 

[JoshuaTheGrizzly]

Best answer selected by JoshuaTheGrizzly.

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey