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Im having a real big problem with My motherboard and ati cards.

First thing i would like to say is if you help me solve the problem that i am having a will give you 1 copy for dirt 3 that i recieved when buying a 6970, if multiple people help, i will give out multiple copys, I have 4x extra i do not need.

NOTE: This is for a gaming computer, not bitocoin mining, or any other shenanigans.


Motherboard: I have a p7p55d-e ASUS mother board. Here is the link to the EXACT one I have:
http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Intel_Socket_1156/P7P55DE/

Problem:
As you can see the motherboard has 2x 16x PCIe slots, One blue, One dark grey.
ANY ATI card that I put into these slots runs at 4x speed. (seen VIA GPU z latest version)
ANY NVIDIA card i put into these slots runs at 16x speed.

Needed Solution:
I need to get ONE ATI card to run at 16x Bus interface.

ATI cards I have:
3x 5770's (xfx)
1x 6970 (currently being RMA's (replaced) by Newegg) (xfx)

Nvidia cards I have:
1x 460 (evga)
1x 465 (evga)


What I have done:
Latest Bios has been installed (Battery taken out full reset has happened)
Cleaned Both pcie slots and pins on both ATI cards

Other information:
I have a i7 860 (no overclock since bios update)
8gb of DDR3 ram (checked for errors no problems with any sticks)
850w Power supply (new)


Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your time,

Pete

If anyone can help me over AIM to make the process faster please pm me

Taken from the Asus website regarding your board:

Expansion Slots
1 x PCIe 2.0 x16 (single at x16)
1 x PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots (@x4 mode, 2.5GT/s, black slot)
3 x PCI Express 2.0 x1 (2.5GT/s, gray slots)
2 x PCI
* The second PCIe x16 slot (black) and the three PCIe x1 slots share the bandwidth from the Intel® PCH. When any of the PCIe x1 slots is occupied, the second PCIe x16 slot will be switched to x1 mode.

Do you have anything in the PCI E x1 slots?  Try taking that out to see if it makes a difference? 

Also if you look at the newegg site review:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131634&cm_re=P7P55D-E-_-13-131-634-_-Product

You'll see that there is only 1x PCI E x16 slot on the board.  Might be that you don't have 2x PCI E x16.

From the spec sheet, you have:
1 x PCIe 2.0 x16 (single at x16)
1 x PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots (@x4 mode, 2.5GT/s, black slot)

Plain and simple, that second slot is physically a PCI-Ex16 slot, but electrically, it can only ever run at 4x.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but that slot just won't do 16x. Chances are, the Nvidia card is misreporting it.


EDIT: Sorry for the caps.

This ^^

I'm running an asus p8p67 which also has a secondary pci-e 2.0 x 4 slot and both my 6950's hash at the same speed. Nothing to be concerned about.

Do we know what the impact would be for a gaming PC, which does more than hashing?

Here's my guess OP: It will work, and it will probably be stable, but you may experience bottlenecking when textures and models have to load in a game if you use that 2nd slot. if you attempt it, I highly recommend that you keep model & texture details on a lower setting to reduce the amount of data going through your reduced-speed bus.

Please note that this isn't the "endorsed" setup specified by the manufacturer, so it may actually be highly unstable under load. I'd pull both cards, and throw the ATI card into slot 1. Load up something like Shattered Horizon or Metro 2033, check framerates. Switch it to slot two, and repeat. For all we know, there is no impact, and you don't need full bandwidth.

Props to the OP for calling it ATI instead of AMD.

It will be slower for gaming yes, but only marhginally so (approx 5%) and visually you wont notice any difference in fps - http://m.tomshardware.com/reviews/crossfire-meets-pci-express,1761-3.html  

dup

It sounds like you are trying to to get the Nvidia card to do physx duty's for you. On that subject you are in luck. There are plenty of examples of people running physx on 8X 4X and 1X channels! There isn't even a significant performance hit until you get down to 1X.

Now about the ATI cards, do they revert to 4X mode only when one of the other PCI-E slots is taken up? What will happen if its the only card in the board?

Is your copy of GPU-Z the latest available? If you update you may be surprised.

If you could give a little more info about any other expansion cards you have it would be helpful. I need to get the right answer to get my game  ;D

sorry for caps:


I AM TRYING TO RUN 1 ATI CARD ON THE TOP SLOT, NOT TWO CARDS.

ANY ATI CARD I PUT ON THE TOP SLOT BY ITSELF RUNS AT 4X

ANY NVIDIA CARD I PUT ON THE TOP SLOT BY ITSELF RUNS AT 16X


NO OTHER EXPANSION CARDS.

Ohh I see. Have you looked over all your BIOS options? Of course I don't have your board so I don't know but that maybe worth your time.

And give GPU-Z and update or double check with another program like SiSoft Sandra http://www.sisoftware.net//?d=dload&f=sware_dl_3264&l=en&a=  Sometimes some software can give false reports due to different hardware configs.

Double checked with everest. and no pcie options in motherboard.

May be a chipset driver issue? Try updating all drivers as needed then check if there may be something in the bottom PCI-e x16 slot that may be causing the motherboard to go into x4 mode. If that doesn't work, I don't know, try running 2 ATI card in both slots then remove only the bottom card after shutting down.

Well, I don't have an answer for you but I have a workaround. According to some graphs I dug up, if you don't mind the concept of being at 4X you might not notice it. http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_5870_PCI-Express_Scaling/25.html

If those numbers are accurate for your card I don't think anybody could really tell the diff.

EDIT: Is the problem the same in the blue and grey slots? It sounds like you have tried each of them but I want to be sure.

Running out of ideas here, but from the manual:

https://i.imgur.com/6ydJu.png

If you've got USB 3.0 running at maximum bandwidth, or you're using SATA-III, 6gbps, it'll cut the speed of your x16 slot. Perhaps there's some weird interaction causing it to disable 3.0 and SIII when you have the Nvidia card in. Try turning those features off to see if it improves things.

https://i.imgur.com/BJyvT.png

IS this on the same setup you first tested nvidia + ATI ?

It might very well be that the windows installation has gone to shit after switching out the ATI card into the blue(16x) slot afterwards.

Try a reinstallation with just the ATI card in blue(slot) , it should resolve this issue if not come back here and tell us if its still at 4x(without going and installating extra stuff) and we take it from there.

For SAG sake have you occupied both slots to see what slot 1 reports?

Have we ruled out the possibility that the OP just happens to have a bad ATI card?