4870 and bus speed x8 rather than x16 performance hi?

[the_jetsetwilly]

i run 2 cards for surround screen gaming and as a result my PCIE 2.0 x16 bus runs at x8 if i get a 4870 will its performance be reduced beacuse of running at x8 rather than x16?

if so any idea what the performance hit will be? anyone care to test it?

thanks

 

[Dark_Angel]

I believe a PCIE 2.0 at 8x is the same as a 1.1 at 16 times... so I don't believe performance will be degradated at all...

 

[the_jetsetwilly]

just ordered one so i'll post my findings in here

 

[Rroff]

I never found a performance hit running an OC'd 8800GT on a PCI-e x8 slot - the 9800GX2 is basically 2x slightly downclocked 8800GTS on one x16 slot (so essentially x8 to each card) and it doesn't seem to suffer either compared to similiarly clocked 8800GTS in SLI on dual x16 slots.

If you were running a "4870X2" whenever that comes out then I would expect to see some performance drop from x8 - you might see some (~5%) with the single 4870 if you were running it massively OC'd and at high res (2560x) and ultra high detail.

 

[the_jetsetwilly]

cheers for the info, by the time im done with a 4870 then its time to retire my OAP 4200x2 S939 so new motherboard time