Upgrading to a Pci 2.0 card on a Pci E mobo?

[mart981]

I've been meaning to upgrade my 8800 GTS 512MB card for a little while to get back to using all high graphics settings at 1920x1200 with the newest games. Budget around £200.

Thinking about going for an ATI 5850 but will it be significantly hampered by using my older mobo - Gigabyte P35 DS3R? If it is I may aswell wait until I do a full upgrade.

I've tried reading up on the differences between PCI e 2.0 and PCIe 1 and get that the transfer speed is basically doubled but practically all the threads that turned up from searching were from 2007/08 and said that newer graphics cards that were 2.0 compatible didn't actually fully utilise 2.0 anyway or even PCI E at the time.

I'm guessing that's changed by now but can anyone give a rough estimate or maybe a link to some benchmarks between a high end graphics card on a PCIe 1 system compared to a pcie 2.0 system?

Rest of system - C2D Wolfdale E8200 3.0, 4 Gig ram, Tagan BZ series 700W

 

[gurusan]

Nothin to worry about. PCI-E 1.1 x16 is fine for a 5850. once you get the video card installed and working fine I would suggest overclocking the CPU a bit though

 

[Paul_M]

Going to piggy back onto this thread as I was going to post something similar as I have the same MB & GC combo, and looking to upgrade my graphics card.

My power supply is a Corsair HX520W, only worry is this will not be enough to run the card, other components in the system are Q6600 @ 3.2GHz, 4GB OCZ Platinum & Samsung F3 500GB.

All seeing that the Sapphire 5850 Toxic is on special this week, is it worth the extra over the standard 5850's.

 

[mart981]

Yes it's a bit dissapointing all of the cheaper 5850's are all pre-order - want to buy whilst I'm in the mood!

Thanks for the info gurusan.

edit: Quite a few places don't have any stock of the lower priced 5850's, seems to be a shortage

 

[sportbilly]

I might be able to help here chaps - I went from a 4850/512mb to Sapphire 5850 with a Q6600 @ 3ghz and 4gb Ram on Vista 32 bit. I have an asus p5b-e motherboard (Pci-e 1.1) and a Seasonic 430W Psu !

My frame rates have doubled in the unigine Heaven benchmarks and in some Crysis benchmarks.

Significant boosts in rFactor and others - Dirt2 doesn`t seem to be much faster strangely - maybe 25%-33% but maybe it`s using DX11 instaed of DX10.

I have the figures jotted down - pre & post upgrade.

So I have a Pci-e 1.1 slot and lower power PSU and have not had a single problem yet.

I knew the PSU would be touch and go but most reviews seem to indicate that the system would hit 320w-350w maximum (at 80% efficiency it was borderline) but seems fine.

That is with 5850 at stock - hope to get a little more out the Q6600 and obviously the 5850 by clocking it but just happy that it all runs at the moment without a need for new PSu or MB.

To be fair the 4850 ran surprisingly well at 1920x1200 with reasonable details - the 5850 allows higher textures and more detail and still getting the high frame rates - I like to sacrifice detail to keep frames around 100 fps if possible.

The BC2 beta did run noticicably better though.

I was toying with a whole new system but the Q6600 still holds it`s head up for gaming and the 5850 is certainly a good match and was a worthwile upgrade for me - I was hoping for at least a 50% increase in frames and it basically delivers at least that and more particularly at higher res & details.

I`ll try to post some hard figures tonight for anybody interested.

Cheers

 

[mart981]

Thanks for the info Billy, nice to get a first hand report. I'm definitely ready to order one it's just a matter of finding somewhere that has a £220ish 5850 in stock. Maybe I'm cheap but never been a fan of paying more for minor differences in cards that are basically the same spec. Especially as prices seem to jump up £30 form the ones I've seen.

May have to wait until Monday, although I'll be able to test Napoleon TW tomorrow with my current card and then see the difference when I hopefully get a 5850 early next week.