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Tom's Hardware > Forum > CPU & Components > NICs > PCI-e 2.0 vs PCI-e x4 slot

PCI-e 2.0 vs PCI-e x4 slot

Forum CPU & Components : NICs PCI-e 2.0 vs PCI-e x4 slot

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Ive bought a PCI-e SATA3 adapter so that I can utilize the full (or as much as possible) bandwidth of my new SSD which is currently running on SATA2 to my motherboard.

My mobo (Asus P6T Delux v2) has a PCI-Express x4 slot available. Is it possible to use this slot for the adapter Ive bought, or does it have to be connected to a PCI-e 2.0 16x slot?


Thanks

------------------------------ Asus P6T Deluxe v2, Core i7 920, Corsair XMS3 DDR3 1600mhz, WD Velociraptor 150gb, Coolermaster CM690
Reply to rivolinho
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PCIe is wonderfully backwards compatible, your PCIe2 card will work just fine in a PCIe1 slot (as long as it is a slot as big or bigger than the card you purchased). It will just run at a slower speed, which is 256MB/s per lane instead of the PCIe2 standard of 512MB/s per lane. In the case of a PCIe1 4x slot it would be 1GB/s which should be faster than a single SSD, but may be a slight bottleneck if you are doing a RAID0 on 2 fast SSDs.

------------------------------ PC: ASRock Extreme3 Gen3, i7 2600, CM Hyper 212 EVO custom fans, 16GB Corsair XMS3 @ 1333, GTX 570, OCZ ZS 750W, 2.5GB HDD Space, Thermaltake V3 Black Edition, Hanns-G 27", Win8CP 64bit

GPUs: http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] cs-card-re
Reply to CaedenV

which card exactly do you own?

Reply to we1shcake

CaedenV wrote :

PCIe is wonderfully backwards compatible, your PCIe2 card will work just fine in a PCIe1 slot (as long as it is a slot as big or bigger than the card you purchased). It will just run at a slower speed, which is 256MB/s per lane instead of the PCIe2 standard of 512MB/s per lane. In the case of a PCIe1 4x slot it would be 1GB/s which should be faster than a single SSD, but may be a slight bottleneck if you are doing a RAID0 on 2 fast SSDs.



Ok cheers, Looks like I'll use one of the free PCI-e 2 ports then just to make sure theres enough bandwidth. I did read somewhere that PCI-e x4 is capable of around 1000mb/s and that should be enough to the cover the 600mb/s that SATA 3 is capable of, is that correct?

we1shcake wrote :

which card exactly do you own?



This is the adapter I have

------------------------------ Asus P6T Deluxe v2, Core i7 920, Corsair XMS3 DDR3 1600mhz, WD Velociraptor 150gb, Coolermaster CM690
Reply to rivolinho

with that card just whack in any pcie slot, itll work in any of em even a x16

Reply to we1shcake

Yeah, Ive got it in the PCI-e 16x slot and the drive is now giving me read speeds of just over 350 mb/s
The write speed is pretty poor in comparison but that seems to be a failing of the 128gb C300. The larger drives have higher writes.

Reply to rivolinho

as thats only a x1 card i believe that limits it to about 500mbps each way, with overhead and other things that 350 sounds about right

Reply to we1shcake
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