P55 PCI-e lanes question

E

Eyeball Kid

Gawd
Joined
Jan 31, 2002
Messages
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I'm a bit confused about the whole lane deal with P55. I'm putting together a new system and I see people talking about this only having 16 lanes - if I use a 16x card in conjunction with a 1x card (X-Fi), will it drop the video down to 8x or am I misunderstanding the concept of lanes?
 
No it only applies to the Graphics card.

p55_diagram.gif
 
If you use any card in the second PCI-E graphics slot, both will be dropped to 8x. However, if you use a dedicated 1x slot, the video card will have the full 16 lanes allocated to it.
 
Zero82z said:
If you use any card in the second PCI-E graphics slot, both will be dropped to 8x. However, if you use a dedicated 1x slot, the video card will have the full 16 lanes allocated to it.
Click to expand...

+1 on that
 
The board I have is an MSI GD80. It doesn't seem like the soundcard will fit in the top 1x slot but the third full pci-e slot also doubles as a 1x slot. Will this affect my videocard in the first 16x slot?
 
I have a dumb slightly off topci question that kind of pertains to this.

If you have a mobo with dual gpu slots, 16x/4x; will this mobo support SLI at all? Will it still go to 8x/8x or would I need to buy a mobo that already has 8x/8x support/specs?

I plan to run SLI for gpugrid(distributed computing) the lane bandwidth does not matter as much as sli for gaming. I currently have a biostar x58 board that is 16/16/4 with no penalty; just wondering if it would be the same for p55? but I would need sli support though.

The way this is is just unclear to me. Thanks
 
INFRNL said:
I have a dumb slightly off topci question that kind of pertains to this.

If you have a mobo with dual gpu slots, 16x/4x; will this mobo support SLI at all? Will it still go to 8x/8x or would I need to buy a mobo that already has 8x/8x support/specs?

I plan to run SLI for gpugrid(distributed computing) the lane bandwidth does not matter as much as sli for gaming. I currently have a biostar x58 board that is 16/16/4 with no penalty; just wondering if it would be the same for p55? but I would need sli support though.

The way this is is just unclear to me. Thanks
Click to expand...
If a board has SLI support listed, it will support SLI, period. If not, then it won't. And I don't think you need SLI to run GPUGrid on multiple GPUs.
 
Thanks,
I was just playing with my x58 machine. Looks like I do not need sli, but on multiple gpu's I would either need a dummy plug or run another cable to the monitor.

Sli would just make it so I can run both and connect with 1 cord.

Thanks for the clarification.
 
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