Will an ATI PCI Express 2.1 graphics card work in a...

[rgathright]

Actually i would because I'm going it myself. The system is a Dell GX280 (aka Drone) with a single x16 PCI Express 1.0a slot that currently has a Nvidia 8800GT installed. I've also had 2 different ATI Radeon 4850s and a 4870. I've not had any problems with any of those cards.

Drone ---> http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=2400421

GX280 specs (Here) Seventh table down titled Expansion Bus

Thanks, just glad we were able to answer all of RadCazz's questions.

[Fire$torm]

Thanks, just glad we were able to answer all of RadCazz's questions.

Any time. Everything we share in the forum will only help the team. We can make the team better, faster, stronger.........

[Slicker]

Any time. Everything we share in the forum will only help the team. We can make the team better, faster, stronger.........

Ching ching ching ching....

[RadCazz]

Thanks for all your replies! You've all cleared up my confusion! I'm headed on over to NewEgg to have a looksee at the cards, but Best Buy is having a sale on the PNY NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti. I think it's a decent price/performance card. If I won the Mega Millions jackpot I'd really have no worries, lol. Then I'd get one of those cool Alienware mobo/pc's with a GTX 690. One can only dream.

Update 6/13/2012:
I purchased the NVIDIA GTX 560 Ti. It does take up two slots - one slot isn't being used. Luckily, my psu has two 6-pin connectors because this card uses both of them. Frame rates are very high. I can run games in ultra and high settings with no lag. I'm gonna install BOINC on this computer and see how crunching projects goes. One thing left to do - overclocking the gpu.

And thanks again everyone for your help/input! I enjoyed reading your replies.

[Aux10]

Basically in theory any PCIE card will work in any PCIE slot of the proper size but as stated there is no way of knowing if the MOBO will take it until you try. The only thing known for sure is that you won't be able to get the benefits of the faster buss speeds made available by the newer generations of the technology.

[Slicker]

AMD's docs have the potential throughput calculations for their GPUs. None even come close to the PCIE x16 limits, so I really doubt you would ever reach the bus max speed. That having been said, you can still think of it like a Porsche 911 vs a school bus. Both can do 60 mph easily, but the Porsche can get up to speed much faster than the school bus.

Also, the top speed is in perfect lab conditions. In reality, the throughput is considerable less. That's been true with Ethernet cards for years. Most 100 Mbit cards can only maintain about 40Mbits of constant data. With really good cards and well optimized drivers (e.g. the type that go into servers which are over $100 each) the best ones can get up to 90-95% of the rated thoughput. Most Gigabit ethernet cards/devices peak out at around 300-400 MBits.

My guess is that the same is true for the PCI Express busses. A faster bus @ 50% throughput will outperform vs a slower bus at 100% because it isn't nearing its theorhetical max. That, and the newer ones are often made with smaller transistors which means the data can travel at a faster rate. The biggest bottleneck is probably the speed of the memory on the GPU itself. Even with DDR5 RAM, moving 300MB of data to and from the device takes a little while.

[kmanley57]

A good analogy - Your funnel is only so big. Your GPU is the bucket of water, and the PCI-e bus is the funnel. It(the funnel) can only do as much as it can no matter how big a bucket you use. So PCI-e 1.0 -> PCI-e 4.0 buss, use a PCI-e 2.1 GPU in a PCI-e 1.0 buss it does PCI-e 1.0 speed, on a PCI-e 2.0 it does PCI-e 2.0 speed, and in a PCI-e 3.0 it does PCI-e 2.1 speed.