Query re PCI slots

ICit2lol said:

Lady Fitzgerald said:

Have you tried the new card in the white slot yet? A 1x card will work just fine in a longer slot. My Xonar Essence STX (not the same as your Xonar) is a 1x card and works just fine in a x16 long slot that runs at up to 4x.

Ok will try it in there but as in my pic I ma tad concerned as to whether the tag will not allow fitting the card into the white slot - am at work right now (meal break )

My Xonar has the same tag. No worries.

Jeannie is right, you can use the white slot and the screw on the bracket should keep it tight.
Many people don't realize an X1, X4, or X8 card will also work in a X16 slot.

ive only ever tried a mini pci in a full length slot once, and i couldnt get it to work, for some reason when screwing the thumb screw into the back plate it pulled the rear of the card out of the slot just enough that it wouldnt register, if i didnt screw up the thumb screw the cables plugged into the device would do the same lol

Britton30 said:

Jeannie is right, you can use the white slot and the screw on the bracket should keep it tight.
Many people don't realize an X1, X4, or X8 card will also work in a X16 slot.

PCI-e lane allocation is confusing. It took quite a while for me to more or less wrap my poor little mind around the concept and I still struggle with it at times when looking at new boards. Asus used to make it easier by color coding their slots but they have gotten away from that with the Haswell and Ivy Bridge-e MOBOs.

There are two kinds of expansions slots still commonly in use: the legacy PCI (which runs at the equivalent of PCI-e x1) and the current PCI-e. PCI-e has what are called lanes for data to flow through; the x1, x4, x8, and x16 designations refer to the number of lanes it supports. For an analogy, think of one side of a freeway. Assuming all traffic is running at the speed limit, the amount of traffic that can flow on that freeway at the same time is determined by the number of lanes it has. Adding to the confusion is PCI-e slots come in only two lengths, x1 and x16. Obviously, x1 will support only x1 cards; you cannot physically fit an x4, x8, or x16 card into an x1 slot. The x16 long slots are more confusing because they do not always run the full 16 lanes (aka x16). Going back to the freeway analogy, an x1 slot is the equivalent of a road with one lane going in one direction. You will never get more traffic to flow over it than that one lane. An x16 slot may have 16 lanes going in that direction but could have barricades set up to restrict traffic to only four or eight lanes. Also, if its 8AM New Year's day, you may have only one car running down a lane, the other available lanes, up to 16, being unused because they aren't needed.

As mentioned, a slot that is 1x will never be more than one lane. However, a MOBO can assign a limited amount of lanes to an x16 slot. MOBOs have to do this because the CPU can handle only a certain number of lanes. Most MOBOs nowadays supplement that number with a chip that adds more PCI-e lanes but there are practical, and financial, limits to how much they can be supplemented. to overcome that limitation with out reducing the number of slots available, the MOBOs will allocate the number of lanes available to a slot, the equivalent of putting up barricades to limit the number of lanes that can be used in our freeway analogy. The result is one could have a MOBO, such as on John's MOBO with four PCI-e x16 slots but only one will run at x16, two will run at X4 and one at X8 (more on the x8 slot in a moment). Two legacy PCI slots were added on John's MOBO to allow the use of legacy cards; the newest boards do not have those anymore.

To "stretch out" the number of lanes available for allocation, most MOBOs now use lane pairing. Instead of each lane getting its own, personal allocation of lanes, a pair of lanes may share the same number of lanes between them. It's common to share 16 lanes between two slots. Because of the way MOBOs allocate lanes, the allocation is always done as x4, x8, or x16 with a certain amount being assigned to each slot. If 16 lanes are allocated to two slots, usually, the first slot will run at x16 as long as the second slot is empty. The second slot will normally run at only x8, period, even if the first slot is empty. If both slots are occupied, the most each slot will run at will be x8. Even if a x1 or x4 card is put in the second slot, the first slot will still be reduced to x8. To further complicate things, I've seen some boards that will share allocations between three PCI-e slots. As long as only the first slot is occupied, it can run at x16. if the first two slots are occupied, they will run at x8 and x8. If all three slots are occupied, the first one will run at x8 and the other two at x4.

What's even more fun is when a manufacturer decides to share a PCI-e allocation with I/O ports (that, and tall dogs, really bites my ample asset). In that scenario, usually, you have to go into the BIOS or UEFI and decide where you want the allocation to go; normally, it's either the slot only or the I/O ports only.

I have an x8 HBA card in a x16 long slot at the bottom of my Asus MOBO. The slot is a black one so it runs at only x8 despite being x16 long. Because it is paired with the blue x16 slot two slots above it, my putting the HBA card in the slot it is in means the blue slot will now run at only x8 instead of x16 (which is ok with me since I'll never run anything bigger than x1 in it). My sound card is in the white slot between the black at the bottom of the MOBO and the blue slot above it. Both it and the other white slot on my MOBO are paired but each is set to run at only x4 even though, physically, both are x16 long. My sound card is happily chugging along in the bottom white slot even though the card is x1, the slot is x16 long, but has only x4 available to it.

Since my x16 GPU is mounted in the top x16 blue slot (the recommended location), which is paired with the black slot below it (that black slot, like the one at the bottom of the MOBO, is physically x16 long but will run at only x8), if I were to put anything in that slot, the GPU would have only x8 to run on which would reduce performance somewhat. It galls me to look at the empty slot, knowing I can't use it without impairing GPU performance. I've wished a million times (give or take) my board had just one more PCI-e slot.

Clear as mud?

Well I am not a violant person but I am on the very edge of taking tis card outside and turning it into pile of tiny bits because it fits snug in both the white and black slots yet doesn't get detected. I shall try the old original two port one and if that does the same thing then it is going to the same way is this piece of crap. I did open the software disk out as the info said to install the Renesas drives but how in any reason can I pick out the right one from the lot in the pic??

To hell with Asus why can't they put enough ports on the back

Can you take a picture of the card itself? A nice close-up, please? Maybe I can identify the chip being used. That's a good way to narrow down the driver choices.

Mellon Head said:

Can you take a picture of the card itself? A nice close-up, please? Maybe I can identify the chip being used. That's a good way to narrow down the driver choices.

Ok mate I'll try. the two port is using an Asmedia chip the four port Renesas.

The fit like I said is snug and the two port lights up so it has power the four port is dead in the water.

Now beig a smart a** I bought a tow USB adaptor cable to fir the internal header and forgot I had used it for a card reader I had at the front so maybe I had better get a powered hub to tap one of the back porst unless this thing can be got going??

Well, I did my best edjumicated guess, and I think I can eliminate a few for you based on the chip and board numbers. At least I don't recognize the drivers and chip numbers as being logically together.

I took your picture and marked it up for the blue card:



Hopefully this narrows it down a little.

BTW, that finger that you show as being partially there may not be a problem unless the board is damaged in some way. Sometimes those fingers are actually made like that. The reason for it escapes me at the moment though.

Edit: The red card's driver is the NEC 720200.

The blue card is using the NEC 720201 chip. Try that driver despite the fact that I said "No" on the picture.

Thanks Mellon Head I will give it another go as long as it is detected that is

Well that was an experience and a half mate one was an ethernet driver another a RAID set whatever to me the whole flaming ting is a shambles.

The card/s themselves I think is completely cactus and Astrotek are a bunch of ratbags. The card I kid you not can be moved sideways half and inch to either side. Trying the software completely mucked things up and I have dome a system restore to two days ago just to get it going again.
So I am going to hoe into these clowns on Monday as they have really p****d me off I have never come across such a sloppy piece of goods all the time I have been playing with electronics and now computers.

Anyway mate thanks for having a go:)