Questions about PCI-E Speeds

[clvrtrvr]

Im building a simple setup to get started and the board I have already has 1 PCI-E x16 and the other is x4. Im probably going to pick up 2 gigabyte 7950's locally and was wondering if because they are both not x16, will it effect my Mhash/s rate? and is by how much?

Thanks in advance guys & gals!

[Coinagect]

In my experience you'll be ok, not a lot of data is passing along the channel

I have a x16 3.0 card plugged into the 1x slot

[Craynon]

It shouldn't affect it too much. It isn't really a data9intensive process, it's processor intensive instead. Data throughput isn't a big worry so long as the processor is up to the job

[ccc]

It doesn't matter at all for mining. I assume you have risers because that's the only way you'll be able to plug the card into a smaller slot.

[DaGreatRV]

The main source of trafic is caused by stuff being written to the RAM of your videocard, from the rest of the system. (ie. textures in games)
Bitcoin does not use your VRAM so that's out of the way.
Litecoin does use your VRAM, but the data that's written is generated by your GPU.

As said here, 1x slot will do fine.

[clvrtrvr]

thanks for the input guys. im just glad i don't have to go buy a new motherboard now lol. Just need a cheap 1155 chip now haha

[clvrtrvr]

would any 1155 chip do? or should i get like an i5 or something. my main mining is GPU. not sure if it would use a little of the cpu or not

[Caesium]

It'll use next to nothing - the cheapest CPU you can find that fits in the socket will be just fine.

[clvrtrvr]

It'll use next to nothing - the cheapest CPU you can find that fits in the socket will be just fine.

thanks, just what i wanted to hear lol

[boobies]

if you want to mine using the cpu as well to get a little extra, I've used pooler's miner on q6600 cpu's (old quad core) with 4 threads each getting ~7Kh/s (~28Kh/s total).

not bad for the cpu which would otherwise be sitting there idle.

[Bitmong]

if you want to mine using the cpu as well to get a little extra, I've used pooler's miner on q6600 cpu's (old quad core) with 4 threads each getting ~7Kh/s (~28Kh/s total).

not bad for the cpu which would otherwise be sitting there idle.

Well, overall it is not likely worth it, because the CPU consumes more electricity when hashing and that electricity costs more than you earn with coins.

[Blis]

I just recently switched a 7950 to a PCI1x powered riser and am having problems getting it to run at full hashing power. I have however read of many others running multiple cards on pci 1x risers and never having an issue.