[SOLVED] Can a faulty PCI-E Slot cause worse FPS in games?

[BlakeW]

Over the past 2 days I have been troubelshooting a sudden large decrease in FPS within my games. The strange thing is, in benchmarks (3DMark) I was getting absolutely normal scoring. I even beat my previous record slightly. When it came to playing games however my FPS would be unplayable and constantly fluctuating. At first I thought it was a damaged GPU so I took my brothers exact same card out from his PC and put it in mine but the same thing happened.

Out of curiosity I decided to put my GPU in my 2nd PCI-E slot and now everything seems to work fine and my FPS is back up to normal. I have already requested a new board under warranty but im curious if this is an actual thing because from what I know usually if a PCI-E slot was faulty the GPU wouldnt work at all.

Can a suspected faulty PCI-E slot result in my GPU performing worse but not unable to perform at all?

 

[Barty1884]

Depends what's faulty, really.
A physical PCIe slot... no, I wouldn't think so. It would either work, or it wouldn't.

However, I have seem boards detecting incorrect lanes available. I had a 980TI + 4790K a few years ago, and one board I had refused to see the GPU running at any more than x4.

Thought the card was defective, or the CPU socket pins were damaging which impacted it etc... but no, socket was fine & when using another board for troubleshooting, everything was running fine - GPU had a full x16 available.


If you were able to detect the card running at x16 though (GPU-Z etc), then that is a very, very strange occurrence - and an RMA of the board is a good route to be going.

 

[BlakeW]

Depends what's faulty, really.
A physical PCIe slot... no, I wouldn't think so. It would either work, or it wouldn't.

However, I have seem boards detecting incorrect lanes available. I had a 980TI + 4790K a few years ago, and one board I had refused to see the GPU running at any more than x4.

Thought the card was defective, or the CPU socket pins were damaging which impacted it etc... but no, socket was fine & when using another board for troubleshooting, everything was running fine - GPU had a full x16 available.


If you were able to detect the card running at x16 though (GPU-Z etc), then that is a very, very strange occurrence - and an RMA of the board is a good route to be going.

I currently have the card in PCIe slot 2 running at x8, ill give slot 1 a go later and see if anything strange happens but from what I know there isnt a large difference between x8 and x16 in terms of fps gain.

 

[Barty1884]

No, x16 vs x8, there really isn't. I think the latest Titan's can saturate Gen3 x16, just about.

But unless you're running x4, the lane impact shouldn't really restrict anything.