cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Z590 Maximus Hero III - Which PCIe slot should I use?

DJDUPONT
Level 8
So here's the Scenario.

I currently have a 3090 in slot 1.

I just purchased a FireWire card that's PCIeX1 compatible. But the 3090 is covering the slot cause it's so big, so I put it in PCIeX16 Slot 3.

Should I move the GPU down to slot 2 to expose the PCIx1 slot and put the FW card in there?
Will moving the GPU to slot 2 affect the bandwidth
Is having slots 1 & 3 populated slowing the bandwidth down on the GPU?
Should I just leave it as is?

I'm thinking I should move to GPU to slot 2 to expose the PCIx1 slot and put the FW card in there, this way I'm not sharing the lanes with the GPU and FW card and giving full bandwidth to the GPU. What do you think?

Thanks in advance.
616 Views
1 REPLY 1

Grimpak
Level 8
DJDUPONT wrote:
So here's the Scenario.

I currently have a 3090 in slot 1.

I just purchased a FireWire card that's PCIeX1 compatible. But the 3090 is covering the slot cause it's so big, so I put it in PCIeX16 Slot 3.

Should I move the GPU down to slot 2 to expose the PCIx1 slot and put the FW card in there?
Will moving the GPU to slot 2 affect the bandwidth
Is having slots 1 & 3 populated slowing the bandwidth down on the GPU?
Should I just leave it as is?

I'm thinking I should move to GPU to slot 2 to expose the PCIx1 slot and put the FW card in there, this way I'm not sharing the lanes with the GPU and FW card and giving full bandwidth to the GPU. What do you think?

Thanks in advance.


second x16 slot might be x16 physical, but it's x8 electrically.

keep the fw card on the bottom slot, it's chipset bound, and as long as it's on default mode (x2), only SATA ports 3 and 4 are disabled.