Question GTX 1050Ti works only in PCIe 3.0 x16 (x8 mode) and Nvidia says 2nd Gen?

[dolomite]

My new ASUS Geforce GTX 1050Ti 4GB only works in 1 black x8 mode slot on my ASUS P9X79-E WS board. I have plenty of slots available, and I wanted to put it in one of the blue x16 mode slots, but I got nothing, just a black screen. I also get a black screen on the other x8 mode black slot I tried.

So after trying 4 slots, only 1 works. I caught a video showing the imperceptible difference between a graphics card in a 3.0 8x slot compared to one in a 3.0 16x slot , so that comforted me a bit. But then I checked system information through Nvidia Control Panel, and it says that the Bus being used is PCI Express x8 Gen 2.

Am I confusing terminology? Is Gen 2 the same as PCIe 2.0? And why does the card only work in one slot?

Any information to help me understand what's going on would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Jeff

 

[dolomite]

I've been trying to work with ASUS customer service to figure things out, and they're confusing me even more. Can anyone understand and help with what they mean by these very short replies?

ASUS:
"In accordance to the recommendation of our engineers, Sorry, the Intel i7-3930k only support PCIE 2.0 and forces the PCI lanes to 2.0. Please purchase 4th generation Intel processor i.e Core i7-4960X to support PCIE 3.0. "

I replied:
"I have done some research since receiving this email response. It appears that many people had no problem with the i7-3930k running PCIe 3.0 and 16x.

There is also this patch from Nvidia:
https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3135/~/geforce-gen3-support-on-x79-platform

What none of this seems to explain however is why the GTX 1050Ti is only posting on one of the four PCIe slots I installed it in. All other cards have always worked fine on this (also Asus brand) motherboard without issue."

ASUS:
"In accordance to the recommendation of our engineers, it appears the GTX 1050 Ti has special PCI allocation and only works with 1 /4 PCI slots. "