Z77 Board with good spacing between PCI-E slots.

sgoaty · 5 Oct 2013 at 15:44

Right this gets a bit complicated.

Ive just bought a 7970 Matrix I really want to try hybrid physx but I cant fit another card in the 2nd slot of my Asrock Z77 Extreme 4 without blocking the air flow to the 7970.

Now im running a 2600k at the moment which i dont really want to change as its a decent clocker but I believe unless I use an Ivybridge CPU running a second GFX card will make both run at 8x. Can anyone confirm if this is correct and if so will it cause a performance hit on the 7970?

Ive heard hybrid physx isnt really worth it but id like to try it for myself.
Anyone suggest a good board for the job?
Thanks
Scott

mjones1 · 5 Oct 2013 at 17:02

Don't bother with it and save yourself some money/ time but as you said you want to try it out yourself fair enough, just don't expect much.

sgoaty · 5 Oct 2013 at 18:41

I know it probably wont be worth the effort but its just for a bit of a play.

sgoaty · 8 Oct 2013 at 21:04

Ive managed to pick up an unused Gigabyte Z77X-UP for £125 its WAY overkill for me but should be fun to play with

$ilent · 10 Oct 2013 at 00:59

To be honest Scott most motherboard PCIE spacing is gonn be similar due to graphics cards needing to be spaced similarly for SLI.

I would just run at 8x, the difference wont be noticeable. Also that motherboard you have tends to under report vcore, well at least on ivy bridge it does. My E4 motherboard underrepoted my vcore on my 3770k by about 0.05v, so when I thought I was running 1.350v, it was actually running 1.400v. Just something to bear in mind.

sgoaty · 10 Oct 2013 at 08:21

The main issue I had was the airflow being blocked on my 7970 this board will at least address that as it has 5 PCI-E slots and the 2 it reccomends using first are 4 slots apart.
So that should solve my main issue with the 3 slot cooler.

Thats interesting about the under reporting volts as my chip seems to be doing better with less volts on this board. How did you find out about that. Checking the voltage manually with a meter?
Thanks
Scott

$ilent · 10 Oct 2013 at 09:17

No I bought a cpu second hand off someone and when I went to apply the same voltage it was nowhere near stable.

Kind of a joke really because I paid a lot for this cpu considering its now probably just better than average as apposed to being really decent.