spynoodle
Active Member
Long story short, the top PCI-e x16 slot on my P5K Pro stopped functioning a few months ago after a problem during transport. Luckily, it has two slots, so I just moved my GT 545 down to the bottom slot. Being a P35 motherboard, I knew that if two cards were inserted, then the bottom card would run at x4 rather than x16 speed, basically ruining the performance of the second card. This is only made worse by the fact that both slots are only PCI-e 1.0. However, I figured that since only one slot is occupied, it would just run at x16 speed. Surprisingly, when looking through the Nvidia X Server Settings in Linux, I discovered that the card is reporting only an x4 operation speed (see screenshots; one screen mentions x16, but one mentions x4). Keep in mind that this is the OEM Nvidia GDDR5 model card, not the crappy retail DDR3 model. I got a pretty good deal for it on eBay, and it's basically just an underclocked GTX 550 Ti that runs cooler and quieter. I would overclock it, but I don't really do any serious gaming that would require the extra performance.
I haven't noticed any kind of performance problem, but I decided to try to benchmark the card to see if the bandwidth difference is hurting me at all. Unigine Heaven is really the only good graphics benchmark for Linux, but I haven't found a good results database to see if my card is running worse than it should be. I've attached a text file of my results, in case anybody knows what a good score would be for my card. If my card really is only running at x4 bandwidth, wouldn't my framerates be noticeably poor?
I haven't noticed any kind of performance problem, but I decided to try to benchmark the card to see if the bandwidth difference is hurting me at all. Unigine Heaven is really the only good graphics benchmark for Linux, but I haven't found a good results database to see if my card is running worse than it should be. I've attached a text file of my results, in case anybody knows what a good score would be for my card. If my card really is only running at x4 bandwidth, wouldn't my framerates be noticeably poor?
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I used to only have an old Radeon x800 XT, but I got the GT 545 mainly for Linux compatibility reasons; there was essentially no driver support for the old ATI cards, especially for dual monitors. However, I still won't be able to sleep thinking that my broken motherboard is forcing my card to perform poorly. 