MVII Formula with EVGA GTX 970 Card showing up as x8 when in x16 lane.

[likwidsolutions]

So I just built my Gaming Rig, or have had it built for a week or so, but NVIDIA was doing a promotion for their 900 series cards where if you buy one by June 1st you get The Witcher for free, but by time I got it from Amazon, the promotion changed to getting The Witcher 3 AND Batman Arkham Knight, both of which I was planning to get anyways, plus the price dropped by 20 bucks on Amazon so I said screw it and returned and replaced it just to get those discounts, which is about 150 if you consider I would've bought those games to begin with.

Anyways, I just installed it yesterday (to be exact it's the EVGA GeForce GTX 970 SC+ ACX 2.0), but haven't really tested it out much as I just reformatted my HDD and SSD cuz a bunch of bloatware was installed on Windows, but I got it up and running how I want now. My PC was reading that I only had 1x8GB Stick of DDR3 Memory, but I have 2, so I am in the boot menu and was checking on things, and got that fixed, but I noticed my GPU (Which IS in the top x16 slot, the top red on that is the longest), and it's only showing up as x8, the only other PCIe card I have is a Gigabyte Thunderbolt/Display Port Adapter with 2 slots for both Thunderbolt II and Display port. I have that in the bottom Red x16 slot because the MVII Formula Manual says that's the only PCIe 2.0 x4 slot which is what it requires (and since I'm not using SLI it doesn't affect my GPUs; if having something else that runs x4 PCIe 2.0, then I'd like to know because I'd rather take a hit and move the Thunderbolt down to PCIe 1.0 than have my GPU running at x8).

I have installed the drivers for the MB and my GPU, I went into the setting of the BIOS and made sure the GPU slot was running at 3.0, but it still says x8, which is frustrating, I just want to download my steam games and get going!

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Nate152]

Hello likwidsolutions

Your pc is working normal, if you add any other pcie cards to the red slots it will drop your gpu to x8. Not to worry though there is no performance loss going from x16 to x8.

If your pcie adapter card is pcie x1 you could move it to that slot and I'm pretty sure your gpu will be running at x16 again but it's not necessary to move it unless you want to.

[Retired]

Put some load on the GPU, and check GPU-Z again...

[likwidsolutions]

Thanks for the reply, but I have no other PCIe card in my motherboard except the mPCIe Combo Card III which is x1 I am prtty sure and it didn't affect my GPU before I recently reformatted. I just downloiaded Batman AA and want to be the Batman!

Honestly the game doesn't seem to need that much power, but when I play the Witcher 3 it seems to take a big hit. So even if it may not make a performance difference (cuz I thought when you go from 16 to 8 to 4 it halves each time in bandwith)

[Nate152]

You say in your first post you have a gigabyte thunderbolt/display port adapter in the bottom red pcie slot? This would be the reason your gpu is running at x8. It does half the bandwidth when you add another card/gpu but your gpu is not saturating the full x8 bandwidth therefore there is no performance loss.

NVidia gpu's need x8 to work, amd gpu's only need x4.

[likwidsolutions]

Ahh yes, I removed that a while ago, but even when I had that in, it still had the GPU as x16, showing up in GPU-Z and in the BIOS. So there are NO OTHER PCIe slots being used, therefore there should be no reason that it continues to show up as x8.

[Retired]

Do i need to spell it out ???..

Put some load on the GPU, and check GPU-Z again...

Its the PCi-E idle state, RMA the card/mobo if its too advanced..

Image from my card--> 2015-06-26

[Geraldoaj]

WhitePaw wrote:
Do i need to spell it out ???..

Put some load on the GPU, and check GPU-Z again...

Its the PCi-E idle state, RMA the card/mobo if its too advanced..


Image from my card--> 2015-06-26

I did that and still on load it shows as " PCI-E 3.0 x16 @x8 3.0 "

Reseated multiple times, cables ok, latest bios both mobo and gpu.

[Retired]

ok, no lost in fps anyway, compared to 16x

but if you are using the top slot, and have avalible lanes, it should say 16x

[Nate152]

Maybe try reseating the gpu and clearing the cmos, if that doesn't help try a bios update.

Try these and see if it goes back to x16.