Asus P5k-E wifi Question

[theburan]

So, I got this mobo in the mail today, and I was flipping through the manual, and I noticed that it said :

This motherboard also supports a Universal PCI-E slot with a maximum speed of 2
GB/s. The operating frequency of this slot changes, depending on the type of PCI
Express card you install. Refer to the table below for details.
When the PCI Express x1 slots are not occupied, the Universal PCIE slot
automatically switches and runs at x4 mode.
The figure shows two graphics cards installed on the primary PCI Express x16 slot
and the Universal PCI-E slot.

So.... I was really hoping to do crossfire with a pair of 1800xt's lieing around, just for kicks, but I was also hoping to use an asus sound card that utilized pcie 1x.... anyone here with one of these mobos know if the 2nd gpu slot will get throttled if there's just 1 pcie1x slot occupied? Haven't been able to find much of an answer on the intertubes.

[polobunny]

Hmm, the P5K-E wouldn't exactly be my choice if you wanted to Crossfire because the second PCI-e is 4x anyway... I don't know, but from the looks of it, it's gonna get throttled down even further. Test?

[theburan]

Yeah, I'm gonna test it tomorrow. To be honest, I wasn't hoping for a giant performance boost from crossfire in the first place, I mostly like this so I can have the 3 monitors hooked up... but... yeah. I'm gonna be sad now if this board doesn't overclock like mad.

Guess I'm gonna just have to run some benchmarks to find out what's up, or look for yet another mobo.

[polobunny]

Originally Posted by theburan

Yeah, I'm gonna test it tomorrow. To be honest, I wasn't hoping for a giant performance boost from crossfire in the first place, I mostly like this so I can have the 3 monitors hooked up... but... yeah. I'm gonna be sad now if this board doesn't overclock like mad.

Guess I'm gonna just have to run some benchmarks to find out what's up, or look for yet another mobo.

What about the overclock? I have mine keeping my E8400 @ 4Ghz, over that it's starting to need quite a lot of voltage so I would say for P35 board it's doing pretty good.
And although the board supports crossfire, it's far from being one of the main selling points of Intel P35 chipset.

[theburan]

I'm just hoping this board overclocks better than the abit board I had or the gigabyte board I had (although the gigabyte board was probably limited by the ram. /shrug.)

And it's not even the 4x part that bothers me, it shouldn't' be all that big of a hit in performance, it's the throttling down to 1x that bothers me, because that sounds like it will probably be very noticeable. If the card even runs at all.

Hopefully the onboard sound is pretty good, then I can avoid this altogether... blah.

[polobunny]

Originally Posted by theburan

I'm just hoping this board overclocks better than the abit board I had or the gigabyte board I had (although the gigabyte board was probably limited by the ram. /shrug.)

And it's not even the 4x part that bothers me, it shouldn't' be all that big of a hit in performance, it's the throttling down to 1x that bothers me, because that sounds like it will probably be very noticeable. If the card even runs at all.

Hopefully the onboard sound is pretty good, then I can avoid this altogether... blah.

Haven't tested the onboard sound so I can't tell you.
As for the throttling, I believe there would be a noticeable difference between 4x and 16x.
PCI express bandwidth can be calculated by multiplying the number of lanes by 250MB/s IIRC, so PCI-e 16x = 4GB/s. PCI-e 4x = 1GB/s. PCI-e 1x = 250MB/s.
The card should still run though even if the PCI-e throttles down to 1x. I'm pretty sure of that.

[theburan]

It just depends on how noticeable it is, to be honest. I mean, 5-10fps less compared to a full 16x 16x setup might be noticeable, but it'll still probably more than the single 1800xt that's powering my games right now (since the 2nd card can't do crossfire in my abit board, lol), so any sort of boost will be appreciated.

Also, I don't think these 1800xt's will be able to saturate even an 8x connection, so the 2nd card shouldn't be hobbled too much. I hope.

Only one way to test, i guess. Hmmm. I wish I wasn't at work.

[polobunny]

Originally Posted by theburan

It just depends on how noticeable it is, to be honest. I mean, 5-10fps less compared to a full 16x 16x setup might be noticeable, but it'll still probably more than the single 1800xt that's powering my games right now (since the 2nd card can't do crossfire in my abit board, lol), so any sort of boost will be appreciated.

Also, I don't think these 1800xt's will be able to saturate even an 8x connection, so the 2nd card shouldn't be hobbled too much. I hope.

Only one way to test, i guess. Hmmm. I wish I wasn't at work.

Yeah, testing it out sounds like the best idea to make sure. :P

[theburan]

Yeah... this is the closest I can get to testing right now though. Since I'm stuck at work. (why do new parts always show up when I'm supposed to work.... )

[theburan]

Well, blah, this motherboard isn't very happy right now.

If I clear cmos it'll post once, let me go into bios or try booting from cd (no os's installed yet to boot from), but once I restart it doesn't do anything. No video or anything. Almost like the cpu power isn't plugged in, but it is.

I supposed I'll have to go find a speaker for the mobo... hopefully it's trying to give me a post code.