Asus Z87 Sabertooth - Issues Filling up PCIe slots

[Som3one]

Hey there,

following situation: Until a few hours ago, I just had a Gigabyte GTX 780 Windforce Rev. 1.0 and a Sound Blaster Z on the Sabertooth like this:




Today I received a second GTX 780 to go SLI. It´s a Gigabythe GTX 780 Windforce GHz Edition and I plugged the board like this:




But then my SoundBlaster wasn´t detected by Windows. So, I googled a little and found out there seems to be an issue with some Asus Z87 motherboards (especially of course with the Sabertooth) where the top PCIe slot is being disabled because it shares the lanes with the eSATA controller and the bottom 16x PCIe slot.

I tried out a little trick supplied by some Asus guy where you disable the eSATA controller and set the bottom PCIe slot to x1. But that didn´t work. 🙁

Last chance for me was to use the bottom slot for the SoundBlaster:




The problem now is that the SoundBlaster covers the first fan of the bottom GPU with only a few mm space between them:




Without the SB in front of it I got temperatures up to 70°C when running FurMark. With the SB installed I got up to 76°C. (Not overclocked that is.)


So, I got two choices:
- Stick with it as it is now.
- Get another motherboard.



And now (finally ^^) to my questions:
1) Do you guys have solution, so I could put the SB back in the top slot?
2) What do you guys think about the current setup and the increased temperatures? Should I stick with it?

 

[Novuake]

+6C is nothing to worry about. Hell that 76C maximum is still an excellent temperature as is.

So you are fine as is and don't need to worry about anything.

 

[Som3one]

Ok, I think I might have tried to put too many thoughts into one post. lol

I know that 76°C is still pretty good. What I am worried about is
A) I only get readings from the GPU temperatures. I am worried about (very) uneven temperature distribution over the first 1/3 of the card.
B) The probable increased temperature of the SoundBlaster. Highly subjective of course but I think that thing gets really hot now that it is so close to the GPU.

 

[Novuake]

In my experience anything in a PCI or PCI-e slot above a GPU gets too hot and will not function correctly. So the way you are set up now is for the best.

Do not worry about the "uneven" heat. There is no way that only 6C, even "uneven" will be a problem.

 

[Som3one]

In my experience anything in a PCI or PCI-e slot above a GPU gets too hot and will not function correctly.

Ha, I never thought about it like this.
But seems logical.

Thanks.

 

[Novuake]

Well heat will spread a lot easier UP compared to down. So makes full sense.

I used a wireless card in my top spot at one point, it literally would let my latency jump by 400ms when it started to get hot, I changed it to bottom PCI-e port and viola, no issues.