Hello
I recently upgraded to 2x SLI GTX 770s from a GTX 590.
I came to find out that i really hate the PCI slot placement on the rampage IV extreme motherboard lol.
I have 2 GTX 770s now a PCI soundcard (soundblaster recon 3d) and an avermedia live gamer HD capture card.
I found out that I could not run all 4 cards at once since it seems since im maxing out the PCI lanes.
2x GTX 770s @ 16x native on the 2 PCIe x16 slots
1x Avermedia live gamer HD on the 8x
1x Soundblaster on another pci lane running at 8x.
Last PCI slot is empty.
PCI 1x slot is covered by the graphics card 😞 Or I would use that and not be having to make this post lol.
This causes my avermedia card not to work at all and not be seen by the system since I guess the PCI lanes are overloaded.
I then tried another setup where I moved the avermedia card to the bottom PCI slot and left the sound card in the middle brown one on the motherboard and then everything worked great...however that then knocks my second GPU down to 8x.
So i decided to compromise and remove the sound card and move the avermedia card back up in between the 2 GPUs so the GPUs would go back to x16 each and the avermedia card would work.
However I realize I really miss my sound card because I was able to play stuff through the speaker and at the same time play stuff through the optical connection on my Astro A40 headsets using the soundblaster recon card. I cant do this with the onboard audio it requires me to change it everytime to which one I want.
So heres 2 things I was looking at.
1. Is there anyway to have the onboard audio play to the analog speakers and the digital connection on the A40 mixamp at the same time?
2. I was thinking of just moving my live gamer card back to the bottom red PCI port and putting my sound card back into the middle inbetween the 2 GPUs (the brown pci slot) and having my 1 GPU run at 16x while the other GPU runs at 8x.
Will having 1 GPU at 16x and the other at 8x hurt performance? Or is it something I shouldnt worry about?
They are both the PNY OC GTX 770s with 4GB ram and factory overclocked...duel fans etc etc. I am also using the RIVE 3 way sli bridge on the 2 cards cause I wanted a space in between the cards for airflow.
Hope I made sense.
