PCI-E bottleneck?

Hey guys,

I am looking to upgrade my 48701gb to a 4870x2, But before i go and do that will my PCI-E slot on my p35 be bottle necking it with it only being 1.0 and not 2.0?

Thanks.

It appears it bottlenecks severely on higher resolutions. but if you stay below 1680X1050 you'll be fine as far as benchmarks and gaming is concerned.

Link to more info

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/crossfire-meets-pci-express,1761-4.html

I game on a 24"(1920x1200), Looks like i will have to pick up a cheap p45 mobo.

yeh_boi said:

I game on a 24"(1920x1200), Looks like i will have to pick up a cheap p45 mobo.

Click to expand...

If your wanting to take full advantage of the 4870X2 then yes a PCI- 2.0 slot would be needed. even with a slight bottleneck your still getting a hell of a card, depending on what you doing you may not need to go out and buy a board right now but if you plan on benchmarking or playing Crysis @ 1920X1200 with 8aa then yes i would go get a new mobo with a PCI-2.0

umm that link doesnt support the numbers for a single card setup. the only bottleneck would be if your going to run a quad cf setup or 2 4870X2's. the 4850/4870 just started needing pcie x8 bandwidth. even at higher resolutions the fps gain from pcie 2.0 is minor(something like 5-10fps, not something that points to pcie 1.0 being a bottleneck). that and you cant exactly compare pcie 1.0 to 2.0 unless you use a 680i vs 780i in the benchmarks. as the NB will make a difference, the 780i uses the same NB but with a few tweaks for 45nm quads. PCIE 2.0 support got added to 780i or 680i via the NV media 200 chip. basicly your single 4870X2 wont be bottlenecked by PCIE 1.0 as long as its running in x16 mode.

No you will not as I've done this move from x16 pci-e 1.1 to 2.0 and saw zero improvement on all games. Even the 4870x2, and I wouldn't be surprised if the gtx 295 was the same, is not bottlenecked at all in actual game play.

Don't know about benchmarks since I don't play them, I play games and have yet to be able to increase any settings and realize that I couldn't do that before. Which also means that a trifire setup on a p45 board will not be bottlenecked.