~Does running one card in x8 slot make much difference?

[Michaeljcox24]

Bought a new board yesterday, Asus P8Z68-V Pro Gen 3, and ran into a problem during the build.

I have an aftermarket cooled GTX470, which has 4 bulky bolts that stick out of back of the PCB that fasten the heatsink down. When I put the card in the 1st PCI-Express slot, I cannot install a soundcard above it (Xonar d2X), because the bolts get in the way of the cards depth (xonar is about 10mm thick)

So I've had to put the card in the white slot (second one down) for the time being.

Will this make much real world difference to performance? Is there any way I can change in the bios the speed at this lane runs at, as I believe it's only x8?

How do other lads get round this who have this board and card? If there were no bolts on the back of the GPU I should imagine it would fit but would still be very very tight.

 

[Matthias2437]

If I am not mistaken it should not really be that noticable of a difference on a GTX470. Even cards like the 590 and 6990 don't use the full potential of x16 slots hardly. So you should not notice pretty much any performance drop having it in an x8 slot.

 

[yassarikhan786]

There will be a very small difference. Most likely a couple of frames at most.

 

[fcb]

Yup, as mentioned it should make very minimal differences in the things you do. It's still recommeded to have the video card in the PCIE x16 slot for optimal performance.