Gen 2 vs Gen 3 in BIOS

[Newerabs]

So a couple months ago my kids stuck the end of a headphone cable into the USB port on the the front panel of my PC and fried the board. I was able to find the exact replacement (ASUS Z97-A) on eBay and installed and everything has been working great.

The last week however, I've been having distortion sounds coming out my HDMI output on my GTX 1070 going to my TV. I did some research and I updated drivers, tried different BIOS settings etc but the fix ended up being changing my PCI-E from GEN 3 to GEN 2 through the BIOS. That completely fixed my issue. Things have been working good and the games I play seem to be fine (I was playing Far Cry 4 at a solid 60 FPS at 2K) however there DOES appear to be some artifact going on in the games (it's very random).

My question is, is it safe to go from GEN 3 to GEN 2? Or should I be looking for another solution?

 

[Dunlop0078]

That's just the bandwidth of the pcie slot I have no idea how changing from GEN 3 to GEN 2 would solve or create any problem, that doesn't make sense to me.

The only thing I could see changing between gen and gen 3 is a slight decrease in performance, however PCIE GEN 2 should still have plenty of bandwidth for a 1070. I certainly don't see how it could cause artifacting.

 

[Barty1884]

^^ Agreed, Gen 2 vs Gen 3 shouldn't make any difference re: performance, and there's absolutely no logical reason it would cause artifacting.

Is your card overclocked (beyond factory)? If so, that's more likely the cause of your artifacting