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PCI-E Lanes Used Up?

Fahrenhe1t
Level 9
I have a ROG STRIX z270G Gaming motherboard; it's got two full-size PCI-E slots (16-8x), two 1x slots, and two m.2 slots. I have an Intel 7700K CPU installed (which has 16 PCI-E lanes).


  • I recently installed two ASUS GTX 1080 Turbo cards in the extended slots (SLI mode)
  • I have two Samsung NVMe 960 drives installed in both m.2 slots (they default to 4x)
  • I recently got an HTC Vive wireless PCI-E 1x card

I'm waiting for a 1x PCI-E extender to plug in the wireless Vive card. However, I started thinking about PCI-E lanes. With all that hardware installed:


  • Will I have enough lanes to run everything?
  • What speed will the graphics cards run at? 8x and 4x?
  • If the graphics cards run at 8x and 4x, would that slow them down?
  • Will both m.2 cards and the wireless Vive run at 1x?


Thanks!
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2 REPLIES 2

HiVizMan
Level 40
The GPU will run at 16x and 8x depending on the work load. The motherboard/CPU will allocate priority to PCI lanes as the task demands.

As long as your new card is on a x1 lane it will not have any effect on your GPU performance.
To help us help you - please provide as much information about your system and the problem as possible.

HiVizMan wrote:
The GPU will run at 16x and 8x depending on the work load. The motherboard/CPU will allocate priority to PCI lanes as the task demands.

As long as your new card is on a x1 lane it will not have any effect on your GPU performance.


Cool thanks!