How much of a limitation will a PCI-E 8x slot be for gaming??

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Thanks to the foresight(not) of Shuttle the motherboard in my SD37P2 SFF system has the PCI-E slots permanently running at 8x!! Of course the official specs never made any real reference to this either at the time!! So far this has not proved a bottleneck for my HD4830 but I was thinking how much of an issue this will be in the next 18 months?? Due to the special motherboard form factors in Shuttles I would need to buy a whole barebones as they do not seem to want to sell the motherboards only(although they made noises about this a while back)!!

Rebuilding the system into a Sugo would be an option although I do not like the look of the SG01 and SG02 when compared to the P2 chassis. Why are there not any nicer mATX cube chassis available which have stealth bays like the P2 design??

I would ideally like to upgrade my graphics card sometime in the next 18 months to a similar level DX11 card to an HD4830 although would this be pointless due to PCI-E bandwidth limitations?? TBH,it would be sad not to be able to play any of the newer titles next year as I do have a Q6600 with 4gb of RAM.

[Terbinator]

There is a thread on here somewhere about PCI-e bandwith and someone suggested that there isnt much difference between running x8 and x16 even on a 4890.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

There is a thread on here somewhere about PCI-e bandwith and someone suggested that there isnt much difference between running x8 and x16 even on a 4890.

Is this with first generation PCI-E slots or PCI-E 2.0?? The SD37P2 has a 975x based motherboard which has first generation PCI-E slots.

[atmadden]

From what I remember reading it will only come in to play where high bandwidth is required such as at resolutions above 1080p but will only really affect cards with 1gb and above per gpu.

[Terbinator]

Is this with first generation PCI-E slots or PCI-E 2.0?? The SD37P2 has a 975x based motherboard which has first generation PCI-E slots.

Tbh i cant remember, so you mite have to run at an equivlent x4 (125MB/s ?) in your case
Could you not just ditch your motherboard (not ideal i know) and pick up a P45/x48 uATX board cheap from somewhere ?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Tbh i cant remember, so you mite have to run at an equivlent x4 (125MB/s ?) in your case
Could you not just ditch your motherboard (not ideal i know) and pick up a P45/x48 uATX board cheap from somewhere ?

The problem is that a mATX motherboard won't fit in a Shuttle as they use the flexATX form factor and hence I would need to get a mini ITX based motherboard. Also the PSU has specific connectors only for Shuttle motherboards and I would need to get a decent small form factor PSU which won't be cheap. The CPU is also located at the front of the case too. In short it would be too costly and I might as well buy another Shuttle P2 barebones for around £200 or rebuild the whole shebang into a Sugo case which is bigger and not as nice looking IMHO. I just don't have that sort of money at the moment too!!

At this rate I may end up getting a console instead!! At least I could play Crysis 2!!

[mycarsavw]

I asked a question about getting CoD4 to work with only a PCI-E x1 slot available (search posts started by me).

A few months down the line and my old man says it's working fine - no issues whatsoever.

[Terbinator]

I asked a question about getting CoD4 to work with only a PCI-E x1 slot available (search posts started by me).

A few months down the line and my old man says it's working fine - no issues whatsoever.

THIS MAY BE THE THREAD I WAS ON ABOUT ^^^^

Atleast you ,ay ahve an excuse to build a new system CAT

[Pob255]

AFAIR it's not a major issue at all, nore is pci-e 1.1 vs pci-e 2.0 (which doubled the bandwidth)
The time when these things become issues is on dual gpu cards.
You may start to see some performance impact with very high texture resolutions as that will involve shunting far more data to the card's memory.

I think the 8800gt suffered a 2%-5% performance drop (1-2 fps in games) when in x8 or that might of sli x8 vs sli x16