Hello,
I have recently acquired a nVidia 8800GTS, and my motherboard is an Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe running an Athlon X2 4400+. Because I'm using a passive cooler on my motherboard chipset, there isn't enough room to fit the 8800GTS in the primary 16x PCI-E slot, so I have to use the secondary 16x PCI-E slot.
Initially, I observed very poor performance (e.g. 3900 in 3DMark06) but I quickly realized that, by default, the secondary PCI-E slot only uses one lane. Then I activated the dual-video mode by switching the selector on the motherboard, which gives 8 lanes to each PCI-E slot. Performance increased dramatically e.g. 7800 in 3DMark06.
Now I'm wondering... Is 8x PCI-E sufficient to guarantee maximum performance with a 8800GTS? I've extensively Googled this topic, but I haven't found a satisfying answer. I know there're issues with the 8800 serie in *actual* 8x PCI-E slots, but here we're talking about a 16x slot set to 8x.
I tend to think that 8x should be fine, as the PCI-E interface was designed to provide enough bandwidth for future generations of videocards, and I believe that AGP 8x was never a bottleneck. Also, my scores seem in line with similar configurations' scores.
What do you guys think? Thanks in advance.