Maximus V Gene suddenly running GTX680 in 8x instead of 16x

[boozy]

Hello,

This morning I turned on my machine only to find that it wouldn't boot. Just a blank screen. No post, nothing. I've had no trouble at all with this board, so I just cleared the bios, and re-entered my settings. After I finished, I noticed my MSI GTX680 Lightning GPU is only running at pcie 8x, both in the bios, and under load in GPU-Z. I've inspected the card, and the motherboard for any problems. Everything looks fine. I tried the latest BIOS, same problem. Swapped PCIE slots, and back, same problem. What has happened to my poor rig?

[boozy]

Contacts cleaned, lane blown with duster. Still the same. This last post by flexnl now has me worried it is a bug of some kind. I don't have another 16x GPU board to test right now, but that would confirm his statement. How can I test if the card is actually running at 16x? GPU-Z agrees that it is running 8x 3.0.

[Chino]

Just to discard some of the other factors. Try cleaning the contacts for the GTX 680 and blowing some compressed air into the PCIe lane.

[Chino]

There is a slight decrease in performance between x8 and x16. But is it noticeable in normal daily usage? No, because it's very minor. 😉

[boozy]

That still kinda sucks that one of the best micro atx boards has to bug out on me...but taking apart this machine and RMAing the board is out of the question right now. I wish there could just be a fix.

[boozy]

Good news, well sort of. Today I picked up a generic 16x VGA card. It shows as 16x no problem. ASUS: 1 MSI: 0. Can we call this diagnosed, or are there any other ideas?

[Chino]

With the amount of hardware out on the market right now and the numerous variations of the same model, compatibility issues are due to arise eventually. I think in your's is a case of an electronica mystery. If you want to see if your GTX 680 went nuts, you could bring that over to a friend's house and try it on their system. Either that or try a VBIOS update. I think there's an update from 2012-10-17. Can't assure you that this will solve our little mystery but it's always worth a try. Anything to save you the time and money from RMAing. 🙂

[boozy]

I tried the new bios, no go. This is a situation where I wish I had "computer friends." I don't really associate with any computer enthusiasts in the real world, so I have no buddies to turn to for a test machine. I'm pretty certain the card has fallen ill, but it would be nice to see it run at 8x in another machine just so an RMA is fully justified. In my years of building machines, I have had 0 faulty motherboards, 0 faulty CPU's, and un-countable faulty GPU's (and have RMA'd at one time or another every single MSI card I have owned.) Based on personal experience I can all but guarantee the GPU is at fault. Don't get me wrong, this isn't a screw MSI rant, it's just that from past experience I know these particular components to be the root of most of my problems. The Lightning is still the 680 king, but now it's more like the kind of king Elvis was before he died....