Can't use PCI-e 3.0 speed because I don't have an FM2+ CPU

dlresponse

dlresponse

dlresponse

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Recently I bought an MSI A88XM-E35 motherboard along with an AMD FM2 processor. I was reading through the motherboard manual and I was shocked to see the following statement

"PCI-e 3.0 is only available with FM2+ processors"

Surely enough, the PCI-e 3.0 slot on my board is only running at PCI-e 2.0 speeds. What has the processor got to do with the PCI-e slot? I have a PCI-e 3.0 compatible graphics card, a motherboard with a PCIe-3.0 slot, 8 gigabytes of 1866 ram so why am I restricted by this?

Is there anything I can tweak to get the slot running at full speed?
 
dlresponse said:
What has the processor got to do with the PCI-e slot? I have a PCI-e 3.0 compatible graphics card, a motherboard with a PCIe-3.0 slot, 8 gigabytes of 1866 ram so why am I restricted by this?

Is there anything I can tweak to get the slot running at full speed?
Click to expand...

Everything these days - the motherboard chipset does very little, as the PCI-Express controller is part of the CPU.

It's not just FM2 chips that have this limitation, Intel chips only supported PCI-E 3.0 from Ivy bridge onwards, despite fitting the same socket as Sandybridge.

Nothing you can do I am afraid
 
You won't get the slot running at 3.0 if the CPU doesn't support it. My 2600k doesn't support PCIE 3 but there isn't really a difference between 2 and 3 to be honest.
 
The bandwidth difference is insignificant. Even if it wasn't, the CPU would bottleneck any GPU that could saturate PCI-E 2.0 x16 bandwidth.
 
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