MY FIRST BUILD! MSI R9 390 showing as PCI x8

[mr music PC]

Hi guys, can I firstly say this site has helped me so much before even being a member. Thank you, looks like a good community here!

Please comment on my build, try not to say I've made poor choices as I won't sleep tonight lol

NZXT Phantom Full Tower White
5820k
MSI X99 SLI Plus
Noctua NH - D15
EVGA 750W Gold 80+
32GB 2133 Corsair Vengeance CL13
MSI R9 390
120gb Hyper X Savage SSD
2TB Toshiba 7200 RPM
ESI Julia 24 bit 192khz soundcard
Win 7

2 issues.

1) Only have space on MB to fit R9390 in PCI E_5

(Juli is the really small PCI shape and those slots are dead middle of the PCI Lane area)

Juli in or unplugged, Bios is showing x8 on the x16 slot 5 for 390.

2) RAM is specified as 2133 13-15-15-28

And CPU-Z and Bios have it as 15-15-15-36.

Thanks so much for any time you take to read this and have a ponder.

I will be working with music, video editing, bit of gaming and graphic design.

 

[Calculagator]

My guess is that it is running at x8 because of your CPU. The 5820k has fewer PCI-E lanes than the other CPUs in its family. Your motherboard may be able to change how they are apportioned. You will have to read your motherboard's documentation to find out. The good news is that running at x8 will make absolutely no difference in the performance you experience. GPUs really only need x4 speeds-x8 is more than sufficient for all modern GPUs.

It is normal to have to manually set your RAM timings and voltage in the BIOS in order for it to run at its maximum advertised rate. You probably won't be able to tell the difference between the speeds, but you may as well set it as fast as it is rated.

 

[mr music PC]

My guess is that it is running at x8 because of your CPU. The 5820k has fewer PCI-E lanes than the other CPUs in its family. Your motherboard may be able to change how they are apportioned. You will have to read your motherboard's documentation to find out. The good news is that running at x8 will make absolutely no difference in the performance you experience. GPUs really only need x4 speeds-x8 is more than sufficient for all modern GPUs.

It is normal to have to manually set your RAM timings and voltage in the BIOS in order for it to run at its maximum advertised rate. You probably won't be able to tell the difference between the speeds, but you may as well set it as fast as it is rated.

Thanks, first responder to my first post!

The OCD anal voice in my head says x8 is half as good..it should be x16.. But 99% of people I've read have said its nothing to worry about other than OCD.

Windows 7 system rating is knocking out a 7.9 for everything and a 7.8 for the mobo. I'm not a benching enthusiast so that's gone far enough to pleasing me. It's funny how dxdiag only sees 4GB ram in any card, I've been told this is the norm. (Mines 8gb obviously)

Just wondering if anyone is msi x99 plus friendly? Or the bios with that? Would prefer to be 13-15-15-28 as that is something I could and want to solve as per your suggestion.

I did use XMP and set to profile 1 which was 13-15-15-28....PC failed to start 3 times on restart and then went back to last default settings.. I'm new to building with hardware and I'm a quick learner regards software/on screen.


Also, is it a decent PC build for a Music DAW/Video/Creative rig? Will do some gaming but offline, not fussed about using PC for distractions.

I couldn't see a difference between Msi x99 gaming 7 and SLI plus all be it 2 usb3 ports and some red paint. And needed £30 saved here and there as was pushing £1300 with extra bits.

 

[mr music PC]

Shame about 5820k PCI lanes..I just couldn't push for more expensive chips than that and didn't fancy anything in the i7 4xxx series as this was higher bench everywhere I looked, newer and similar price.

To be honest I don't see how I'm ever going to require anything more than a 24 bit audio card, and more than 1 beastly graphics card in there.

Looking at the bench, it's a nice leap up from FX8350 which I loved for its price point. And was on a poor Sony Vaio before that.

 

[Calculagator]

It's really not a shame about the "missing" PCI-E lanes. You still have more than enough. It's like missing ports that you would never use anyways.
For your RAM, using XMP may not be enough. You may have to manually set the voltage to 1.65V or whatever the official specs are in order to achieve stability on the XMP profile. If you can't get it don't worry about it-it really won't make a difference for your usage.

 

[mr music PC]

It's really not a shame about the "missing" PCI-E lanes. You still have more than enough. It's like missing ports that you would never use anyways.
For your RAM, using XMP may not be enough. You may have to manually set the voltage to 1.65V or whatever the official specs are in order to achieve stability on the XMP profile. If you can't get it don't worry about it-it really won't make a difference for your usage.

Thanks Calculagator.

Installed video editing software to break in the GPU last night.

Playback in application at 1920 x 1280 HD resolution full screen at the highest setting and it was absolutely stable. It's absolutely epic that I can edit while watching it at top quality.

Will close the topic now, so for any other people new to building there PC, if you aren't going to be a benching enthusiast, stock DDR4 RAM settings as well as PCI lanes appearing as x8 rather than x16 should do nothing to effect your experience.

At least on a build similar to mine!

Thanks.

 

[mr music PC]

Not sure if I still have issues or not. BIOS says one thing, CPU Z another.

 

[mr music PC]

CPU Z is stating I've got QUAD channel???. Despite MSI saying it should be in slots 1,3,5,7?

I'd be hesitant to get more ram until I know for sure she would boot to desktop. Part of me wants 64gb RAM in the future, just to feel like a boss.