• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

PCI Express 2.1 compatibility?

Associate
Joined
15 Jul 2007
Posts
151
Location
Bristol
I have an Asus P5K motherboard in my system, and recently the graphics card has decided it's had enough and won't work anymore. I've had a look at the current line up of cards on offer and noticed they all seem to be for PCI Express 2.0 or 2.1. Since this is not mentioned in the mobo spec I'm assuming it is 1.0 or maybe 1.1?

The card I was thinking of getting was the XFX ATI Radeon HD 6870 Black Edition. Would this be compatible with my motherboard? And would the lack of 2.1 support bottleneck the graphics so much that there is no point spending more than £35 on a new graphics card?
 
Soldato
Joined
23 Apr 2009
Posts
11,973
Location
Cheshire
Yes, with a P35 board like yours the PCIE ports are 1.1. However, modern PCI v 2.0 and 2.1 graphics cards are fully backwards compatible with 1.1 ports. The only "issue" is that 1.1 ports have half the bandwidth of 2.0/2.1 ports. So if you install a PCIE v2.1 x16 card in a P35 motherboard then it will effectively run at PCIE v2.1 x8 speed.

However, if you look at a review like this, the performance drop jumping down from x16 to x8 is tiny, even with high-end graphics cards.
 
Back
Top Bottom