MSI Z97 Gaming 5 - running nVidia cards in 4x PCIe 3.0

[ruberbub]

Good evening,

I would like to ask a question regarding installing 3 GPUs into the aforementioned motherboard (MSI Z97 Gaming 5).

Currently, I have RX 470 and GTX 1050Ti (both from MSI). and my PCIe lanes are set to 8x/8x.

There is also an option for 8x/4x/4x in the BIOS.


My RX470 is currently in the top PCIe 3.0 slot (8x right now).
My GTX 1050 Ti is in the second PCIe 3.0 slot (8x right now).

I am planning to install another GTX 1050Ti in the 3rd PCIe slot which will turn the slots to 8x/4x/4x

I don't mind the bottleneck that this may bring, I am using multiseat software and I want every user to have his own GPU, right now 2 users have to share the RX 470 which is not optimal..

My questions are:
Is the 3rd PCIe slot a 3.0 one?

Can nVidia card work in PCIe 3.0 4x slot? (Nvidia always states that atleast 8x PCIe is needed to run multiple GPUs, but that should only apply to SLI, which I will not use, right?)

I am not sure because I have searched the forums and there are actually different answers (some of them say YES, others say NO).

I would like to have a definitive answer if possible.

Thank you in advance

 

[jossrik]

Says on the product page the third PCIe slot is 3.0. Also has a pic of three video cards populating the board, so I'd say ya, you can put three in, but like you said, SLI won't be available cause NVidia restricts it to x8. Also, x4 won't be that much of a bottleneck. As to whether it will work for what you want, not sure, never played with it like that. I've always run either SLI or crossfire with multiple cards. Mixing card companies in one machine makes for driver headaches (AMD/NVidia, manufacturer doesn't matter, Gigabyte/MSI/EVGA...)