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  • #1

    PCI-e 3.0 card in a 2.0 slot

    I posted this elsewhere (fewer techies) and the one response I have gotten so far was "dooo eeet/chances are it'll work, and it'll be even more awesome once you upgrade to the new mobo." I just wanted to get a second opinion.

    I have a question on video cards, as I'm looking to upgrade, soon -- I'm looking at moving from a GF 240-type card to a 650 or 660 type. The card I'm looking at uses PCI-e 3 x16, but my mobo only has a PCI-e 2 16x slot. What I've read online makes me almost 100% confident that the type-3 card will both fit and function in the type-2 slot, even though it will be bottlenecked, effectively being restricted to the equivalent of PCIe 3 x8.

    Has anyone had experience with this sort of thing? I am willing to give it a shot because I want a card that I can move over to the new system once I am able to upgrade to a new, more modern mobo/cpu in a few months (looking at next Spring or so), with an SSD as the boot drive. The price difference is within ten or twenty bucks of the price of the v2 Fermi equivalent, so I figure I would be better off with the v3, even if it does get bottlenecked as a result.

    Note that the most graphics-intensive stuff I run are MMO's like NW and FFXIV, as well as games like Borderlands 2 (I don't generally play FPS games, and, even when I do, they're single-player affairs like Deus Ex: HR). Thus, I don't care about getting 100fps on Ultra settings in the middle of a firefight -- I care about a consistent framerate in what I do play.

    tl;dr: Will this work, and will this do for now? I figure it can't possibly be worse than the 4-generations-old card I have now.

    General idea of cards I am looking at:

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814130910

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814130825
    "For a musician, the SNES sound engine is like using Crayola Crayons. Nobuo Uematsu used Crayola Crayons to paint the Sistine Chapel." - Jeremy Jahns (re: "Dancing Mad")
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  • #2
    In short , yes it will work (backwards compatibility) however you may not get the full potential out of the card since it is possible the GPU's will saturate the bus

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    • #3
      Mkay, thanks! That's what I had gathered from my research ^_^ I just wanted to ask before I made the plunge, as my income is such that computer upgrades are something I normally have to "set money aside for".
      "For a musician, the SNES sound engine is like using Crayola Crayons. Nobuo Uematsu used Crayola Crayons to paint the Sistine Chapel." - Jeremy Jahns (re: "Dancing Mad")
      "The difference between an amateur and a master is that the master has failed way more times." - JoCat
      "Thinking is difficult, therefore let the herd pronounce judgment!" ~ Carl Jung
      "There's burning bridges, and then there's the lake just to fill it with gasoline." - Wiccy, reddit
      "Retail is a cruel master, and could very well be the most educational time of many people's lives, in its own twisted way." - me
      "Love keeps her in the air when she oughta fall down...tell you she's hurtin' 'fore she keens...makes her a home." - Capt. Malcolm Reynolds, "Serenity" (2005)
      Acts of Gord – Read it, Learn it, Love it!
      "Our psychic powers only work if the customer has a mind to read." - me

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      • #4
        In fact, you probably won't even be bottlenecked.

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        • #5
          The card will downgrade to 2.0. It will work and you will see a performance increase, just not as much as if it was a 3.0 slot.
          I AM the evil bastard!
          A+ Certified IT Technician

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