290X stuck in 8x PCIe mode whilst in 16x slot

[FrenchTart]

As per the title. Reading up on this I suspect I may have accidentally bent a pin on the motherboard (or got a bit of thermal paste in there - don't ask). Does this sound about right?

Motherboard in question is an Asrock P67 Extreme6 and CPU is a 2500k. Card is in the middle PCIe slot as I get no output in the first slot with this particular card (old 6970 works fine however).

 

[PaulyD]

Does it increase if you run the render test within GPU-Z? Some cards automatically downclock the port port speed/bandwidth when idle. (say PCI-E 1.1 8x etc)

 

[Puppetmaster]

Are you sure it supports more than 8x in that slot?

 

[Streetlight]

As per the title. Reading up on this I suspect I may have accidentally bent a pin on the motherboard (or got a bit of thermal paste in there - don't ask). Does this sound about right?

Motherboard in question is an Asrock P67 Extreme6 and CPU is a 2500k. Card is in the middle PCIe slot as I get no output in the first slot with this particular card (old 6970 works fine however).

http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/P67 Extreme6/?cat=Specifications

Am Sure Middle(slot 2) is only 8x. could be wrong.

''- 3 x PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots (PCIE2/PCIE4: Single at x16 (PCIE2) / x8 (PCIE4), or dual at x8 (PCIE2) / x8 (PCIE4); PCIE5: x4 mode)''

 

[mmj_uk]

Take the card out and look inside the slot to see if if it has electrical contacts all the way across, the middle slot will probably be only wired for 8x it's usually only X79/X99 etc where you have multiple 16x slots.

 

[VincentHanna]

Update the Bios and re-try in Slot 1.

It might not have been seated correctly.

 

[DazQ87]

I was under the impression that the 2500k didn't support PCI-E 3.0; therefore it is running at PCI-E 2.0 16x mode which is the equivalent of PCI-E 3.0 x8 mode.

This is why it reports as being in x8 mode.

 

[VincentHanna]

Should be reported as 2.0 x16 still though.

 

[fs123]

Read the following review. It will be 8X in the second slot. But card will be fast enough in 8X mode anyway, you will not notice a difference.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/asrock-p67-extreme6-asus-p8p67-deluxe-msi-p67a-gd80,review-32173-3.html

Extreme6 buyers still get four external and eight internal USB 2.0 ports, four external and two internal USB 3.0 ports, four SATA 3Gb/s, six SATA 6Gb/, and dual gigabit network ports. One of the internal SATA 6Gb/s ports is still shared with eSATA, and even the x16-length graphics card slots are carried over with x16-x0-x4 and x8-x8-x4 transfer capabilities.

 

[FrenchTart]

Thanks for the replies everyone. I could've sworn I double-checked that the middle slot had 16 lanes but I guess I must have misread it.

I may try changing the bios version and swapping to the first slot. I'm running the latest beta at the moment so I could try the latest stable instead.

As the board is pcie gen 2 I think 8x would actually affect performance for the 290x. Or is that wrong?

 

[VincentHanna]

By a few fps, probably.