GTX 285 and PCI-E 8x....
 

So, I've had this 8600 GT card in for physx... I wasn't quite aware until just recently that having it in cuts my pci-e slots down to 8x each since this board really wasn't designed for any multi-gpu implementations even though it supports crossfire and non-sli setups with 2 pci-e slots...

The question I have is... would that be cutting my performance down significantly?

I ran a 3dmark'06 bench and pulled in 15,500... I am too far removed from the industry anymore to know if that's good or not.

Advice?

Re: GTX 285 and PCI-E 8x....
 

It might be slightly low... but it's not that far off from where it should be for your setup. My '06 score is in my sig and our systems are pretty compairable... I probably score higher because of my CPU overclock as it looks like you have your video card clocked almost the same as mine. I bet if you ran your CPU at my speeds (as you have the same CPU) you would probably get around the same score. I'd say you are fine.

Re: GTX 285 and PCI-E 8x....
 

dont bother with 3dmark06... its mainly cpu dependent with a GTX285... try 3dmark vantage instead

Re: GTX 285 and PCI-E 8x....
 

K that's good to know... I'd like to clock my cpu up a bit but i'm running into serious temp issues when I overvolt... soon as I get a new heatsink I'll be better off.

I took the card out today, it hardly affected performance but I did notice that it went up slightly... I can't really confirm that the 8x pci-e was gimping performance but just to be on the cautious side i'm going to leave it out for now... 8600 GT is pretty underpowered anyway for some physx enabled games

Re: GTX 285 and PCI-E 8x....
 

I have never had any problems just running PhysX right off my GTX285 that I am using to game on :p The card is a beast!

Re: GTX 285 and PCI-E 8x....
 

Yeh... I've noticed depending on the game there's a significant improvement running physx on the 285 as opposed to the 8600 GT... cryostasis and Batman both ran better than having a dedicated 8600 GT.... it's just too underpowered to really do well as a dedicated card

Re: GTX 285 and PCI-E 8x....
 

With a physx card, 8800GTS, my vantage score went down by about 300, so scores going down, I think is acceptable. In physx games, there is a pretty huge boost though.

Re: GTX 285 and PCI-E 8x....
 

try cryostasis at 1920x1200 ;)... with my GTX280 i averaged in the 20's.. there were a couple places with single digit fps (nana2)

Re: GTX 285 and PCI-E 8x....
 

Thats how I played that game ;) I did dip into the 20's a few times... but for all the eye candy it was worth it!

Re: GTX 285 and PCI-E 8x....
 

That's weird, I thought when I put my 9600GT in as a PhysX card, it ran at PCI-E 1x for the 9600GT and my main card at the time, a 260, still ran at 16x.

Re: GTX 285 and PCI-E 8x....
 

It's motherboard dependant.

My Gigabyte board automatically splits the PCI-e lanes whenever a 2nd card is present. It was never really designed for serious 2 card graphics solutions... it doesn't support sli, but technically crossfire, but it splits the lanes... so there are obvious disadvantages to it.

It really all depends on your motherboard's implementation

Re: GTX 285 and PCI-E 8x....
 

My MB is a Crossfire P35 one.