[SOLVED] GEForce GTX 1660 Ti in PCI-E 2.0 slot

[pcdorney]

Hi,

Slowly upgrading my machine. I still have an older motherboard (Gigabyte EX58-UD5) but I just upgraded to a GEForce GTX 1660 Ti (my old card died which made upgrading the video card the next thing). How much of an effect will the PCI-E 2.0 slot have on the performance of the GTX 1660 Ti? I only have a 1080p monitor (no 4K).

Thanks,
Peter

 

[Eximo]

Doesn't really matter if you already have it. Mixing new and old parts will always result in situations like this. It goes as fast as it will go.

If the question is what will it do without limitations, look at the benchmarks and reviews for the 1660Ti. You can then test your own system and see how it compares.

Leaving the matter of the bandwidth aside, it is going to be more effected by the CPU in the system. Even if it is nice quad or hex core, still going to be like 7-8 years behind in architecture and optimization.

 

[pcdorney]

My CPU is a Intel Core i7 975 Extreme Processor.

 

[Eximo]

Impressive, had an i7-960 myself, overclocked to 3.67Ghz.

A fine CPU, but it is still behind when it comes to per core performance. Not obsolete, just not as fast as you can get these days.

So if the goal is to max out the GPU, as they do in benchmarks, you would turn V-sync off, crank the settings all the way up and see what the FPS is in a particular game title or testing suite. Then you monitor the CPU, if you see it spiking up to 100%, well an impressively multithreaded test, but most game titles rely on single CPU cores to handle the bulk of the game engine. So I would expect that to impact your final GPU output more so than the bandwidth.

Sadly, testing PCIe bandwidth limitations fell out of favor a long time ago. There is no real data to consult when it comes to recent GPUs. There is the usual 8x vs 16x when using SLI, but since that is only supported on the top end cards, they often don't bother.