Injured mobo, temporary solution, PCI lanes, help!

[WolfyUK]

So my friend managed to spill an alcoholic beverage into his machine. He couldn't afford a new build, so I carefully de-stickied and bathed everything, dismantled the GPU and ram and replaced the thermal material, and tested at length. The surviving components were a Ryzen 1600, Titan XP and 2 sticks of Corsair Vengeance 8gb DDR4. I had him in the shower scrubbing the various parts of the case (electrical components removed ofc).

On the understanding that he was going to need a new machine soon, I found a B-Grade B450 Aorus Elite on this site for him, thinking that as an AM4 board with 3.0x4 M2 he could look at incrementally upgrading the processor and ram over time, then eventually upgrade the mobo and finally the GPU. He bought a Sabrent NVME and a b-grade Phantex revolt 850W pro from this site. I hooked it up. It all ran beautifully for the Frankenstein's monster it was.

For a few hours.

Apparently there was a flash of LEDs and it stopped working, and then work happened, and Christmas, and I finally got to look at it this week. I'm fairly sure the PSU is dead; I can't get it to power up but at some point in the future I'll get a scope on it. Replacing the PSU with an old PowerColour 850W Gold let the motherboard spin up, but it didn't get past VGA test (nothing on screen, VGA led on the board.) After cycling through known good PSUs, GPUs, cables and a LOT of expletives, I've determined the following:

• PCIEx16 is not functional at all.
• PCIEx4 works fine.
• M2 which shares lanes with PCIEx16 is functional.
• USB3 header is damaged - I never hooked this up, could have caused a short?
• I'm never buying B-Grade from Overclockers again.
• Mostly because I didn't get any Haribo in my last order.

At the minute the monster is running fine with the Titan in the PCIEx4 slot, so I come to my actual question (MAN I talk a lot). How badly throttled is a TITAN XP on PCIEx4 with a Ryzen 1600?
Second question - is there anything else I should try (I've replaced the BIOS battery and flashed the BIOS) to get this running?

 

[Tetras]

At the minute the monster is running fine with the Titan in the PCIEx4 slot, so I come to my actual question (MAN I talk a lot). How badly throttled is a TITAN XP on PCIEx4 with a Ryzen 1600?

TPU have quite a few PCI-E scaling articles, I checked one for a 1080 (which is slower than the Titan XP, but I think uses a similar GPU) and a 2080 Super (which is faster) and my best guess is no more than a 5-10% loss, but some games seem to saturate the bus bigger than others, so there may be exceptions (I think the Titan's big memory bus & 12GB of VRAM will help to minimise this).

 

[humbug]

I agree with the above, the Titan XP while a monster in its day would not saturate 4 PCIe 3 lanes too much, i don't think you would be suffering much if any difference.

If however later on he or you put a much newer' faster card in it, then you would run into problems.

 

[TrojanWhore]

• I'm never buying B-Grade from Overclockers again.
• Mostly because I didn't get any Haribo in my last order.

Don't forget that B grade DOES still have 90 day warranty, which it sounds like you're still inside!

I have no suggestions for addressing the second point I've quoted

 

[WolfyUK]

TPU have quite a few PCI-E scaling articles, I checked one for a 1080 (which is slower than the Titan XP, but I think uses a similar GPU) and a 2080 Super (which is faster) and my best guess is no more than a 5-10% loss, but some games seem to saturate the bus bigger than others, so there may be exceptions (I think the Titan's big memory bus & 12GB of VRAM will help to minimise this).

Thanks, that's about what I thought. I've started reading some of those, pretty interesting.

I agree with the above, the Titan XP while a monster in its day would not saturate 4 PCIe 3 lanes too much, i don't think you would be suffering much if any difference.

Thanks.

Don't forget that B grade DOES still have 90 day warranty, which it sounds like you're still inside!

I have no suggestions for addressing the second point I've quoted

Sadly, I think we're outside - totally our (his) own fault. We're both charity workers, and there was a bit of "OK, stick a pin in this, not going to have time to use it anyway" over the December/Holiday/Post Holiday crisis period.

Fortunately we had some mini bags of Haribo left over from Halloween, so the build could continue!