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Hey guys,
I'm starting to come to the end with my new build and the final part is to add another 7970 once I get my OC Bundle back of course. Anyway I've also got a Soundcard (Creative Recon3D Fatal1ty) but when I've been looking at the ASRock motherboard it doesn't seem very well suited to running crossfire and offering the space for my Soundcard...... Unless ive overlooked something (I have been up all night lol!). What do you guys think I should do?
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What's the layout of the motherboard?
Is it this one?
http://www.asrock.com/mb/photo/Fatal...ofessional.jpg
There are two arrangements:
Sound card in top PCI-E x1 slot
Graphics cards in top two PCI-Ex16 slots.
or if the heatsink is too tall:
Stick graphics cards in top two PCI-Ex16 slots
stick your sound card in the bottom PCIEx16.
Yep a pci-e card can be put into any larger slot, so you could easily put it into the bottom x16 slot, it'll only run at pci-e x1 because that's all the card is, but it'll run.
Heck you can actually get open backed pci-e slots so you can put a larger pci-e card into a smaller slot (granted you lose bandwidth doing this, ie if you put a pci-e x16 card into an open backed pci-e x4 slot then it'll only be able to run at pci-e x4 but it'll still run)
Only issue can be that plugging in a card can have an effect on the other two slots as they share pci-e lanes, just double checked the ASRock website for that motherboard
my reading of that is that the bottom slot will run at x8 if only the top slot is populated, if both the top and middle slot are populated then the bottom slot will run at x4Quote:
3 x PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots (PCIE2/PCIE4: Single at x16 (PCIE2) / x8 (PCIE4), or dual at x8 (PCIE2) / x8 (PCIE4); PCIE5: x4 mode)
So that's all good (my worry was that on some boards it'll run x8,x4,x4 if all three are populated)
Thanks for clearing that up guys, I didn't realise that I could play the card in to the full sized slot, means I can go ahead with getting the other 7970 on payday :)
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