Maximum PC

I tried to search for this, but didn't really see any answers. A web search gets a few results.

Would there be a lot of performance loss running a PCIe 2.0 Graphics card in a 1.0 PCIe slot? My frame rates are down in games, and from my understanding this would make the most difference for my gaming. The slot is still a 16x slot but only on the 1.0 protocol? In my web search most people seemed to think the 1.0 bandwidth was plenty for most 2.0 cards to be minimal loss of performance.

Just checking out the July MaxPC suggesting an ATI Radeon HD 5850 for an upgrade to a GTX 8800 card which is what I used to have before a warranty replacement. And all the 5850s I looked up were PCIe 2.0, but there was no mention of if that is recomended for a 1.0 system in the article, even with the realm of GTX 8800s living in the 1.0 erra.

The second half of my question then is, am I wasting my time with upgrading the card in my current system and would be better off getting a new system? I'm trying to stretch it's gaming ability out a couple more years. It's currently a:
-Core 2 Duo E6600 – 2.40GHz (FSB 1066MHz) (Conroe core LGA 775)
-EVGA 122-CK-NF68 LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI Motherboard
-4GB DDR2 800
-GeForce GTS 250 (which is already a PCIe 2.0 card - warranty replacement for dead GTX 8800)
-Win7 64bit

From my understanding the MB is pretty much at its limit right now with the only CPU upgrades being moving over to a quad core possibly, but from my understanding my online FPS frame rate problems are more graphics card limited. Any help woudl be great, I have no idea where my sytem really stands now campared to what is available.

You should not have any problem.





Ted

A handful of people have had issues with 2.0 cards running in nforce 5 and 6 series boards. Please check to make sure the bios your motherboard has is pretty recent. My friend is fighting with this right now on an nforce 650 sli and 5770.

Ya, from my experience there hasn't been any trouble. But I've heard of others like Alex is stating, and are just pulling their hair out trying to just get them to function.

I don't think you're wasting your time really. It's pretty hard to find newer 775 boards, and if you do they're not much better than that. I'd say the video card upgrade is fine, but if you change any other hardware like HDD or especially the CPU, start thinking about a new board. And of course, if the video card doesn't work in the board, it'll make the choice much easier

A lot of people like the Gigabyte EP45T-UD3LR and the Asus P5Q Pro Turbo and would allow you to keep all of your hardware and not make it be a major upgrade.

hi, i have a ASUS Striker Extreme 680i nforce board, had an 9800GX2 and upgraded to an ATI 5870 PCI-E 2.0...

upon boot, i had to let it sit for 1.5 minutes and it would finally post... and boot up just fine. and as long as i didn't power off, and just did a "restart" the problem wouldn't show up again. only on a cold boot would it hang the bios.

i got tired of the weirdness in fear it might damage the card, and replaced my motherboard, cpu, ram.

works fine now, no problems what so ever.

I had an old M2N-SLI , an Nforce 5 mobo, I tried to install an ATI 5850 and the system would never boot right....I thought bad vidcard..changed it and the same issue. As soon as I put my old 9800gtx+ the system booted with no issues.

The current crop of ATI card dont claim to be compatible with anything less that PCI-e 2.0. So only 2.0 and 2.1 .

I went out and bought an Asus M4A77d, swapped all my components to it ...put my new card , install OS ..and bingo the system booted right up with the vidcard that wouldn't allow a clean boot before.

So yes there are issues with old chipsets and this newer crop of DX11 cards
(at least ATI brands for me )....

I would get a newer mobo from your brand/chipset of choice and avoid the hassle.

You know you wanted a new mobo as well right?

thredge, just curious what manufacturer is your 8800 and 250 from?

For NecessaryEvil, they were BFG Tech cards before they went under. I was sad to see them go as my last couple of nVidia cards were from them.

Anyway, just thought I would throw an update out there. I ended up waiting a while longer and splurged on one of the GTX 570 cards. Here comes the funny part, in most games it didn't help much. I was able to turn ups some effects and resolution some, but what I was looking for was Frame Rates, and they didn't want to jump over 30. Don't think that was a PCIe 2.0 issue really, as I had started reading a lot of reports that the console ports games are today use way more CPU than they really should. So I'm glad I waited because I did have some Christmas money to help upgrade to a new Sandy Bridge system that helped out a lot with all the frame rates.

So, to wrap up this issue, I would say yes, you can upgrade to a PCIe 2.0 card in an older motherboard, but the games of today might not make it worth it anyway. On thing I didn't try was bumping my old system to a quad core first, but with the prices of the new sandybridge to the price of trying to get an old quad core, I needed a motherboard and really cheap memory and I would have a current gen system, so to me was worth the cost of a motherboard.

Thanks for all the feedback.