Motherboard SATA6gb/s makes PCIe x16, x8

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aka.Goliath

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I have an Asus P7P55D-E LX, which it says comes with true USB 3 and SATA III, but it turns out that you cannot use both at the same time and when you do 'Level up' to one of these it changes the PCIe x16 to x8. What I want to know is I have a Asus HD 6870 Graphics card in it, how will having the PCIe running at x8 effect how the card performs? The whole reason I'm using the SATA III port now is that I have a new SSD.
 
1) Performance hit on that card will be minimal, less than 2%
2) Your SSD does not saturate a SATA2 interface, so no need to plug it into SATA3
3) Those boards were made that way - to scavenge PCIe lanes to feed USB/SATA3
 
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aka.Goliath said:
I have an Asus P7P55D-E LX, which it says comes with true USB 3 and SATA III, but it turns out that you cannot use both at the same time and when you do 'Level up' to one of these it changes the PCIe x16 to x8. What I want to know is I have a Asus HD 6870 Graphics card in it, how will having the PCIe running at x8 effect how the card performs? The whole reason I'm using the SATA III port now is that I have a new SSD.
Click to expand...

LOL at you for getting Intel. :D
 
My SSD read/write is 500 MB/s, while SATA II gives 3 Gb/s (making it actually 375MB/s) SATA III gives 6Gb/s (making it 750MB/s). I can really feel the difference between the two.
But Thanks it's nice to know that it won't affect the performance that much.
 
SATA uses a 10b/8b encoding, which means that for every 10 bytes of data that it transmits/receives, only 8 bytes of actual data is being transmitted/received, which is why SATA II is limited to 300MB/s and SATA III to 600MB/s, and not 375MB/s & 750MB/s respectively.
 
aka.Goliath said:
I have an Asus P7P55D-E LX, which it says comes with true USB 3 and SATA III, but it turns out that you cannot use both at the same time and when you do 'Level up' to one of these it changes the PCIe x16 to x8. What I want to know is I have a Asus HD 6870 Graphics card in it, how will having the PCIe running at x8 effect how the card performs? The whole reason I'm using the SATA III port now is that I have a new SSD.
Click to expand...

Lol almost the exact same setup here, but I have a SATA 2 SSD, the difference in speed from 8x to 16x is very minimal if not non existent. :) so yeah leave level up on SATA 6
 
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