arjo_reich

Question
Will it even work?

Background
So my father-in-law, the master of RMAs bet me that he could get my Gigabyte 8800 GTX replaced even though I had ripped the shader-clock clean off the board... long-story, didn't thin out the thermal adhesive with enough AS5 apparently.

Anyways, that little SOB got himself a free GTX260 out of the deal, but here's the kicker. All he has are craptacular e-machines and the only thing he can put it into is a PCIe x1 slot. It's his card now, I'm not going to challenge that but will the damn thing even work in a single lane slot and if so, anyone have any guesstimates on how the performance will be?

If it does get it to work, I'll see what futuremark/3d mark has to say about it, but I'm not sure that he won't burn the damn thing up just trying to boot it. He's got to go get himself a better PSU first because the craptacular e-machine 350W he has in there is obviously not gonna cut it anymore. Even if he tried to hook it up there aren't enough leads to support it.

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Paradigm Shifter

It'll work, but it'll be badly bandwidth limited.

I'll try to find the proof. It's on TPU... IIRC it's about a 25% performance loss.

edit: Here's the article, it's done with a 5870, but the overall message is clear enough.

You'll need an open-ended PCI-E 1x slot, of course, for the card to fit in it.

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RaBidRaBit

It can be done at a sacrifice of bandwidth.

Check the folding forum. Much experimentation has been put into it.

You can mod the slot itself if the back is closed or get an extension and mod it.

For folding the bandwidth cut has no effect but I do not know the performance hit taken for other tasks.

EDIT: Great News : PCI-E X1 Folding WORKS!
Universal x1 PCIe Adapter

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Exostenza

Have mercy man.... don't do it.

jovi9

lol dont dude ur wasteing money cause you not getting wt you paid for

DuckieHo

It works but will be massively limited....

I'm guessing a GTX260 needs "x4 or x5" worth of PCIe 1.x bandwidth so you're looking at a 75% performance drop.

Better off selling the card and upgrading the mobo + new video card.

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To answer most of your questions: (1) a fridge cannot cool a PC (2) 64-bit OS for over 3.4GB (3) If a PCIe card fits, it should work (4) Resolution, not screen size (5) If you have a question, it is not news (6) Report, not respond to Spam (7) Single-Rail/Non-Modular PSUs are not always better than Multi-Rail/Modular

arjo_reich

Well, in this case he paid $0.00 for it. *I* paid almost $500 for the brand new 8800 GTX when it first came out but since i completely destroyed the original card and he got this RMA for free, it's completely his to with whatever he pleases.

I tried to tell him it's the equivalent of putting a bullet-train on wooden tracks but it'll still be better for gaming than his onboard graphics adapter built into his e-machine so I'm sure he'll think it's the greatest thing in the world. :shrug:

Like I said, I bet him there was no way GIGABYTE was going to pass that RMA with the shader clock ripped off but he managed to get it to slip through, and got a faster card than the 8800 GTX to boot. Kudo's him, i just hope the extra heat doesn't cause his system to overheat, those damn e-machines are craptacular to say the least.

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nathris

Yes it will work, but its only going to be good for web surfing and folding.

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Lord Xeb

Nope. Ain't going to happen! A GTX260 needs a lot of bandwidth and a X1 slot will bottleneck it worse than a fat mouse trying to fit through a pen!

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DuckieHo

...what PSU is in the system?

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To answer most of your questions: (1) a fridge cannot cool a PC (2) 64-bit OS for over 3.4GB (3) If a PCIe card fits, it should work (4) Resolution, not screen size (5) If you have a question, it is not news (6) Report, not respond to Spam (7) Single-Rail/Non-Modular PSUs are not always better than Multi-Rail/Modular