Which **** designed....

NirK

NirK

NirK

Soldato
Joined
22 Jun 2012
Posts
3,732
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UK
....The new Z97 motherboards PCI slot placement? All of them except for the high end models have 3 effectively useless PCI-E x1 slots.... You have 2 beneath the x16 slot which will be covered by a graphics card / too close and block the graphics cards fans and you have 1 above the graphics card which cannot be a good idea if you have a nice soundcard with all the heat from GPU below it.... Now i'm going to have to sell my Xonar STX PCI-E card and buy a standard PCI one just because they put them in the most stupid places possible... Those 3 slots are basically useless and may as well not be there at all.
 
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I have my 1x sound card in a 16x slot, do you have one available? If not you could get an external sound card, something like the Asus Xonar U7.
 
FredFlint said:
I have my 1x sound card in a 16x slot, do you have one available? If not you could get an external sound card, something like the Asus Xonar U7.
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Nice one I did not know that was possible...

I still think the placement of the x1 slots on most z97 motherboards is stupid, the 2 below the graphics card will be blocked by dual slot GPU and the one above it will be getting 80 degrees of graphics card heat straight onto it... But not a problem now you have told me that thanks. I will put GPU in PCI x 16 and Xonar STX in graphics slot 2 and hopefully the graphics will still run at x16.
 
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If I run the Xonar STX in the bottom graphics slot, will the top one with the GPU in it still run at 16x?
 
NirK said:
If I run the Xonar STX in the bottom graphics slot, will the top one with the GPU in it still run at 16x?
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I have tried this with my Asus M6F and it turned my graphics to 8x. I use crossfire, so basically I got x8x4x4 even though I have manually set PCIe speeds in Bios.
 
Providing that you dont have a massive cooler blocking the topmost x1 slot, it's perfectly fine to put an audio card above the top gpu. Ran an asus xonar DX like this in a Z77 board with sli'd gpu's.
 
Although im on a asrock 990fx board, so this may mean nothing. With my two gpus blocking the x1 ports, and if i put the sound card in my 3rd pci slot, it leaves no gap for the 2nd gpus cooling.

I have a x1 usb3 pci riser that are used in mining rigs from the very top X1 slot to a spare opening under the motherboard in my full tower case, so i get a fair bit more airflow.

They also decided to put a huge heatpipe on my board just behind the top x1 slot, so nothing longer than 2 inches will fit.
 
setter said:
Providing that you dont have a massive cooler blocking the topmost x1 slot, it's perfectly fine to put an audio card above the top gpu. Ran an asus xonar DX like this in a Z77 board with sli'd gpu's.
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I wouldn't be happy doing this... Typical graphics card get to about 75 degrees and heat rises so it will go straight to the sound card, if it was a Xonar DX I wouldn't mind but a Xonar STX I don't want to risk it...

If it won't work in the graphics card slot without lowering the GPU then I will have to use the vertical slot with a riser cable, when I said snap I meant if I open the case or knock into it or something. Looks like I do not have much choice other than mount it vertically or get a Xonar ST. Another reason I am happy that I ordered the fractal R4 instead of coolermaster silencio :D
 
NirK said:
I wouldn't be happy doing this... Typical graphics card get to about 75 degrees and heat rises so it will go straight to the sound card, if it was a Xonar DX I wouldn't mind but a Xonar STX I don't want to risk it...

If it won't work in the graphics card slot without lowering the GPU then I will have to use the vertical slot with a riser cable, when I said snap I meant if I open the case or knock into it or something. Looks like I do not have much choice other than mount it vertically or get a Xonar ST. Another reason I am happy that I ordered the fractal R4 instead of coolermaster silencio :D
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I ran it for over a year like this, also tried a larger D2X that i borrowed from a relative, (was thinking of buying one). No problems with it either. Cards were also non ref heat dumper gigabyte wf models. With reference models most heat is expelled out the back of the case.
 
Minstadave said:
Your ambient case temps aren't going to damage the card.
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No but the temps 5mm above a graphics card are not going to be great, I would rather either run it in the 2nd graphics slot (if that doesn't change it to 8x) or get a riser cable and mount it vertically. Does it matter which riser cable or any cheap one will work? Is there a good brand for them?
 
setter said:
I ran it for over a year like this, also tried a larger D2X that i borrowed from a relative, (was thinking of buying one). No problems with it either. Cards were also non ref heat dumper gigabyte wf models. With reference models most heat is expelled out the back of the case.
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It may be alright but the STX has loads of capacitors and it will lower the lifespan probably, so I would rather put it somewhere else as its a £130 sound card, costs more new than the motherboard I am going to put it in. Will it definately make the main graphics go to 8x (on an asus z97-A)?
 
NirK said:
It may be alright but the STX has loads of capacitors and it will lower the lifespan probably, so I would rather put it somewhere else as its a £130 sound card, costs more new than the motherboard I am going to put it in. Will it definately make the main graphics go to 8x (on an asus z97-A)?
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I'm pretty sure it will make your graphics to run at 8x unless there were some settings in bios to manually override that. As I mentioned earlier it does make my xfire setup to run at 8x4x instead of 8x8x.
 
I am not sure what the point of putting the lanes on the CPU is if it cannot dynamically swap them or something, I do not understand it well enough but I would have thought the point of putting it on the CPU would be that it could do stuff like that.
 
On my Z87 Gigabyte the bottom full length slot is shared with all the X1s and doesn't affect the X16 or X8.
 
NirK said:
I wouldn't be happy doing this... Typical graphics card get to about 75 degrees and heat rises so it will go straight to the sound card, if it was a Xonar DX I wouldn't mind but a Xonar STX I don't want to risk it...

If it won't work in the graphics card slot without lowering the GPU then I will have to use the vertical slot with a riser cable, when I said snap I meant if I open the case or knock into it or something. Looks like I do not have much choice other than mount it vertically or get a Xonar ST. Another reason I am happy that I ordered the fractal R4 instead of coolermaster silencio :D
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The air temperature even as mentioned above at 5mm above the GPU won't be anywhere close to 75C - in a heavily OC'd SLI system with no water cooling and case venting GPUs worst case it peaks at about 40C - with GPUs that exhaust heat out the back less than that. (My previous system had a nzxt blackline case with one of the temp probes stuck to the back of the GPU - was pretty rare to exceed 28C except on hot summer days).

I ran a SB Live! in that position in a system with one of those 6800 ultra extreme cards (core ran at 105C in normal use and vented stupid amounts of heat into the case) for years without any negative effects.

If your worried about it position a fan to blow air through the gap (spot fans can work though the ones I've experience of haven't been the quietest of fans).
 
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