pciex lane limitation with xfire and a soundcard?

Soldato
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22 Dec 2002
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Hey all,

I've got a p8z77-v pro and am wondering what my options are - apart from buying a new motherboard with a bridge chip to get around the lane limitation on my asus board.

I've currently got two 5850's in xfire and am looking to add a dedicated sound card :

I assume my only options are to

Buy a board with bridge chip
Buy a single card based gpu solution
USB Sound card?

Thanks
 
Just connect the soundcard to the top PCI-E slot? It's controlled by the Z77 chipset and not the CPU.

The bottom PCI-E x16 slot is also controlled by the Z77 chipset, and runs in x4 mode.
 
Just connect the soundcard to the top PCI-E slot? It's controlled by the Z77 chipset and not the CPU.

The bottom PCI-E x16 slot is also controlled by the Z77 chipset, and runs in x4 mode.

Excuse me being a tad stupid, I don't understand? The top slot won't eat into my 2 8x slots already being used?
 
it should work to a degree.

when i had my Z68 ud5 with 480 sli and a d2x card, it ran in 8x/8x but as far as i can remember, there was no separate pcie controller or anything

i did have issues with the sli dropping out, and if sli worked, my sound card was unreliable.


there was also no plx chip on the UD5 to the best of my memory but it worked off the chipset and not the cpu on the slot i was using.

i gave up in the end and went dual gpu card.

best advice i could give is to buy the card and see if you have issues with it.

myself and Andrew Moore both ran 2600k/Z68UD5/8GB/D2X but he had 580 sli and i had 480 sli

we both had the exact same issues.
 
Ahh bugger!

I didn't want a soundcard but apparently if I'm spending £140 on a set of pc 360's I really should have one!

I'd change to single gpu now, problem is the two 5850's are still a cracking combo and not a great deal beats them at a reasonable price point!
 
The first 2 PCI-E x16 slots are controlled by the CPU, while the rest are controlled by the Z77 chipset. So using the Z77 controlled ones will not steal any lanes from the Crossfired cards.

I have my 7950 on a CPU controlled slot and my Xonar DX on a Z68 controlled one, and both are working fine, with the 7950 having full x16 lanes.
 
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