Unusable PCIe slots?

[helpful55]

I ran into something that seems funny to me so I’ll ask here if this seems normal. I have a Gigabyte F2A88X-D3H mobo. It has a PCIex16, then two x1’s and finally a x4 slot. No onboard video as I did not buy an APU as I intended to run a separate video card from the start and didn’t know that I would run into this. I run two video cards for my three monitors. I am not doing gaming. I have my main square monitor and a second wide monitor which is usually off, that I use at times for video on that card also. I have a second square monitor when I need it for tasks that is on even less, that runs off the secondary video card. I like to have all these with separate ports so I don’t have to be flipping switches. I could have got a three monitor video card but had hangups with that so I ended up with two separate cards. Main card is in the x16, secondary is on the x4. I put my PCIe tuner card into one of the x1 slots and it killed all of my video. Giga tells me I can’t use the x1’s when I use both the x16 and x4. Does this sound right? Seems funny that I can only utilize two of the four slots. Are both of my PCIe1’s now unusable due to the two video cards?

I have a separate USB tuner I use so I am ok and I could go with a PCI tuner or a three monitor video card to change this, but I am just curious on this all. Thanks for any ideas here.

 

[Rogue Leader]

Because the tuner card is technically a graphics card there are no allocated PCIe lanes. The board only allocates 20 lanes to PCIe graphics which are taken up by your two graphics cards (x4 + x16 = 20).

EDIT: just wanted to add not all boards have this limitation, and folks were critical of it in reviews.

 

[helpful55]

Because the tuner card is technically a graphics card there are no allocated PCIe lanes. The board only allocates 20 lanes to PCIe graphics which are taken up by your two graphics cards (x4 + x16 = 20).

EDIT: just wanted to add not all boards have this limitation, and folks were critical of it in reviews.

Ok, thanks for the info. So I guess my wonder was kind of justified. I probably didn't see something like that in reviews or didn't know of the potential future problem. I'll sure watch for this kind of thing if I upgrade sometime. Seems kind of wacky to end up with unusable slots. Thanks again.

 

[Rogue Leader]

Because the tuner card is technically a graphics card there are no allocated PCIe lanes. The board only allocates 20 lanes to PCIe graphics which are taken up by your two graphics cards (x4 + x16 = 20).

EDIT: just wanted to add not all boards have this limitation, and folks were critical of it in reviews.

Ok, thanks for the info. So I guess my wonder was kind of justified. I probably didn't see something like that in reviews or didn't know of the potential future problem. I'll sure watch for this kind of thing if I upgrade sometime. Seems kind of wacky to end up with unusable slots. Thanks again.

You just said what a lot of reviewers said as well. In the future look for a board with 3 full size PCIe slots, that will definitely give you what you need.