Can I use only my second PCI-E

Z

ZodaEX

Supreme [H]ardness
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Sep 17, 2004
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I got one of those passively cooled HD6850 video cards and it's overheating my south bridge and causing instabilities. I do happen to have a crossfire ready board with a second pci-e 2.0 slot. Would it work to move my card down to that slot even though i'm only running one card? Thanks!
 
It should work fine, i wouldn't trust a passively cooled video card unless you have a fan blowing across its heatsink. Sure for 2d desktop, watching movies maybe fine. But in my experience a demanding game can cause them to overheat.
 
buttons said:
It should work fine, i wouldn't trust a passively cooled video card unless you have a fan blowing across its heatsink. Sure for 2d desktop, watching movies maybe fine. But in my experience a demanding game can cause them to overheat.
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I do have two 80mm fans blowing right onto the heatsink. My bigger problem is im using a crap case from 1998 with almost no air exaust. The back of my case is sealed off aside from the back of my psu so hot air just builds up in my case with no where to go.
 
You could drill some holes in the case to allow better air flow, that aside you can swap to a lower location or even try undervolting to try and cool it down a bit.
 
depending on the chipset both slots should still be pci-e 2.0 x16 as long as only 1 card is plugged in either slot. its only when you have 2 cards it should drop to 8x or 4x.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
depending on the chipset both slots should still be pci-e 2.0 x16 as long as only 1 card is plugged in either slot. its only when you have 2 cards it should drop to 8x or 4x.
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Cool that's what I was hoping. So i finally got off my lazy butt, got a nice antec case with a rear 120MM exhaust fan and moved all my components over to that. So far with about two days of usage I've had this game I play a lot, Garry's Mod completely freeze on me during gameplay. Since its only happened once i'm hoping it was a one time thing but I suppose time will tell. In my old case the whole rig would reboot when the card got too hot so i'm not sure what happened last night to it.
 
Yes you can use the second pci-e slot but as was already stated the card will run at what ever the speed of that slot is.
 
Okay I finally found the culprit. Heat. Even after switching to the new Case, my HD6850 would heat up my southbridge too much while playing videogames and make the game crash. I bought a 2x 80MM FAN PCI bracket off of ebay, stuck it right under the HD6850, and finally the card will stay cool enough to never overheat the southbridge. I've never had such a hot card before and it was surprising to me how much effort it took to keep the temps down. (although i'm happy with the huge performance boost :) )
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
depending on the chipset both slots should still be pci-e 2.0 x16 as long as only 1 card is plugged in either slot. its only when you have 2 cards it should drop to 8x or 4x.
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Not necessarily. Some boards do not have the second PCI-E 2.0 x16 slot wired with an x16 connection. Many of them only wire it for x8, so electrically it will only be x8. That said, x8 bandwidth will never bottleneck a 6850.
 
It should work fine but may not run at 16X as others have said, look in the manual for what it will run at
 
as stated above, depends on your mobo as to what the #2 slot will run at. what model of mobo do you have?

pendragon1
 
pendragon1 said:
as stated above, depends on your mobo as to what the #2 slot will run at. what model of mobo do you have?

pendragon1
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My motherboard is a BIOSTAR A870U3. Sorry my sig isn't totally up to date at the moment, i'm currently doing power consumption tests before I update my sig with my new board and videocard models.
 
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