My Galax GTX 970 EXOC won't fit the PCIE1 x16 on the ASRock Z77 Extreme 4-M

[minhvu2102]

Hello everyone,

My card won't fit the PCIE1 slot which runs at x16 due to my RAM getting in the way. To compromise for this I had to move my card down to PCIE3 slot which for some reason runs at x8 (as shown in GPU-Z). Apparently the PCIE3 slot will always run at x8 even when the PCIE1 slot is empty (http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Z77%20Extreme4-M/?cat=Specifications)

The layout of the board can be seen here: http://forums.tweaktown.com/attachments/asrock/7599d1425113464-asrock-z77-extreme4-m-z77ex4m-png

So I'm just wondering if this reduces my card performance by any chance, even a few fps? Does anyone else have this problem?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Noah Siano]

You're talking fractions of a change in fps

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Impact-of-PCI-E-Speed-on-Gaming-Performance-518/

You'll be A-okay!

 

[chenw]

Yeah you should be fine. Not many games are known to be dependent on PCI-E bandwidth (I only know of 1 where it has significant impact, most of the others are several % at most).

 

[minhvu2102]

Aah OK thanks everyone for their help!