PCI-E 4x card running at 1x Asus P6T

snowdog

snowdog

snowdog

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Hello,


I bought an Asus S6U3 card to get sata 6gbps speeds for my SSD, while a little bit faster than the onboard sata plugs, it still doesn't get full speed.

Went from 7.8 to 7.9 in the Windows score, and in the HD tach test I went from about 270 ish mb/sec read speed to 320 mb/sec and burst speed of 360 mb/sec now so a bit faster than sata2.



The controller is 4x, the white pci-e x16 port is also 4x on my mainboard, yet the card is running at 1x:


Any idea how I can eliminate the bottleneck, why is the bloody card running at only 1x speeds ?
 
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Drivers don't affect the pci-e speeds though does it ? I took that picture in the (cards) bios before windows boots. It says it is running at pcie1x while the box says it should be running at pcie4x.

Problem is not the bandwith between the controller chip and the ssd, the problem is the pcie1x speed the card is running at limiting bandwith to 5gps.

Anyhow, I'll update the windows drivers, but I can't see how this will affect the connection speed between the card and the mainboard. The problem is ( I think) the card is running at pcie1x instead of pcie4x.


EDIT: updating drivers did nothing whatsoever to the speed.
 
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Why don't you try it in a blue slot and see if it makes any difference?

5Gbps also makes no sense.

Assuming it's working at x1 speed in a PCI-E 2.0 slot then the maximum bandwidth would be 4Gbps.
 
Surveyor said:
Why don't you try it in a blue slot and see if it makes any difference?
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I can't. I have a triple slot Graphics card ( Asus GTX570 directcu II), the white slot should be enough though according to specs it's @ 4x speed and suitable for tri sli so can't see why it'd run on 1x speed :(.

5Gbps also makes no sense.

Assuming it's working at x1 speed in a PCI-E 2.0 slot then the maximum bandwidth would be 4Gbps.
Click to expand...

Hmm okay. Odd. Well the speed I get is definitely faster than sata2, but I'm still not getting the max out of my my SSD, which is 550mb/s read... I also thought the 5Gbps is odd..
 
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snowdog said:
Hmm okay. Odd. Well the speed I get is definitely faster than sata2, but I'm still not getting the max out of my my SSD, which is 550mb/s read... I also thought the 5Gbps is odd..
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You probably never will get the maximum speed out of the SSD with the Marvell controller the card uses.

A lot of motherboard owners with the Marvell controller built in for SATA 3 have found them to be pretty crap and not that much better than the Intel SATA 2 ports.
 
Download AIDA32 and check to see what speed the card is running at, I suspect that 1x on the bios screen is just a reporting glitch or that the SATA controller is only using a single lane atm (1 lane per port used?).

As others have mentioned though, the general concensus is that Marvell 6G controllers aren't really much better than Intel 3G controllers unfortunately.
 
mmj_uk said:
Download AIDA32 and check to see what speed the card is running at, I suspect that 1x on the bios screen is just a reporting glitch or that the SATA controller is only using a single lane atm (1 lane per port used?).

As others have mentioned though, the general concensus is that Marvell 6G controllers aren't really much better than Intel 3G controllers unfortunately.
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You're right, it is running at 4x :( according to aida64.

Shame, more or less wasted 30 euros then.

Ah well, it is slightly faster, 360 mb instead of 280 mb burst, and sustained read speeds are about 50 mb/s faster... Also 7.9 instead of 7.8 in the windows HDD benchie... I wanted at least 500 mb/s though haha.

Ah well, 2 extra USB and Sata ports then :).
 
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