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4850 Bandwidth limitation?

C

chrono03

Weaksauce
Joined
Aug 21, 2007
Messages
89
Hey guys, my 4850 arrives in the mail today.

I currently have an asrock 775dual-vsta motherboard. I am fairly sure the mobo has a x4 pci express slot(does anyone know differently?). I have an e6600 with 2 gigs of ocz ram running at stock FSB levels.
I will be playing games other than crysis, such as wow (obviously doesnt tax the vid card) bioshock and other games like that. I usually game around 1600x1200 resolution with special effects turned up.

Will my mobo severely limit the FPS I get on games? If so, which mobo should I replace mine with if i need raid, and no CF. I would like to get a decent overclocking board to get my e6600 to about 3 ghz, as i have appropriate cooling to do so.
 
x4 is definately going to hammer your 4850.

There's a bit of controversy over bandwidth limitations concerning PCI Express 2.0 x 16 lanes which run as 8 x in Crossfire (on the P45 chipset) , so i would suggest you start looking for a new motherboard at once.

You can't go wrong with the P45 chipset if you're only going to be using one card (and even if you did crossfire on P45 the verdict is still out on whether or not P45 chokes the cards in question).

P45, X38 and X48 all sport PCI 2 x 16 lanes, so these are your best options.

However, if you can pick up a cheap and respectable P35 board (which you can, trust me) you'll go from x 4 PCI 1 to x 16 PCI 1. The theoretical bandwidth of x 16 PCI 1 is the same as x 8 PCI 2.0. And as there's still no clear evidence of x 8 PCI 2 affecting the performance of a 4850 in any meaningful way you really can't go wrong.

I'll leave it to others to make more direct suggestions on particular boards as i'm a little pressed for time.

Hope this sheds some light on the situation and your options.
 
Also, I have quite a bit of data stored on my raid setup. Over 300 gigs. If I buy a new mobo, will I run into issues when reinstalling windows? Or will I be able to keep all of my existing data, and just reinstall the o/s
 
if my memory servers me right, you will be fine as long as the new MB is set to enable RAID and they are both running intel chip sets. I took my raid from a 975express to a x38 and it was fine when i turned on raid in the BIOS. IT saw my 2x500=1tb all data was Aok.

BTW best to leave the 2 raid drives unplugged until you set the bios setting
 
I am thinking about ordering the GA-EP35-DS3R mobo to replace my existing one. Seems like it fits my setup perfectly. Also, should i get the GA-EP35C-DS3R (a newer and more recent version of the mobo) that supports DDR3? It seems like a waste of money because i dont plan on using ddr3.

Does anyone know if I will be limited in the games or things I can do with a x16 pci express 1.1 slot versus a 2.0 slot?
 
DDR3 is pretty pointless at the moment, so I would forget about the C variant. You should take a look at the EP45-DS3R though, it's probably not much more expensive than the P35 version and also supports PCI-E 2.0 and 8X/8X Crossfire. With that board, you won't have any bottlenecking issues except for possibly Crossfire at very high settings, which probably isn't really a concern for you right now.
 
Yeah, a PCI-E 4x slot would bottleneck almost any modern mid to high-end card these days.

Also, DDR3 needs some big timing and price improvements. With DDR2 so cheap for even high-end memory, it would be silly not to get it. The memory in my sig totalled at $185 USD, and that was a few months ago, so I'm sure it is even less now.
 
Thanks for all the input, i ordered the asus p5q p45 mobo.

And for what it is worth, my motherboard was crashing when playing videos that likely taxed the video card greatly.
 
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