External nvidia egpu throttling PCIe link speed to 2.5 GT/s

Hello, I have been having a fun time troubleshooting an external graphics card (gtx 770) hooked up to my thinkpad x230 via expresscard with a transfer speed of 5.0 GT/s.

The problem comes up when I try to play games, occasionally the system will run fine at 5.0 GT/s, sometimes for a few hours, but sometimes the PCIe link speed will throttle down to 2.5 GT/s until I restart the game. I’ve tried messing with nvidia-settings, changing “Preferred Mode” to Maximum Performance, but no luck. I don’t see anything useful in the bios.

I’m using arch linux with the nvidia-beta drivers.

If anybody has any clue how to pin the link speed to 5.0 GT/s that would be appreciated. I’m considering switching back to the regular nvidia drivers to test those but I’m pretty sure I’m using the beta drivers because the regular drivers were causing some other issue.

Okay I have no experience with this but it got.my interest and I have looked into it before so came across something.

ExpressCard 2.0:

The ExpressCard 2.0 standard was introduced on March 4, 2009, at CeBIT in Hannover. It provides a single PCIe 1.0 2.5 GT/s lane (optionally PCIe 2.0 with 5 GT/s)

So yours is probably falling back to PCIe 1.0 speeds for some reason. There unfortunately is where I run out of being any help.

1 Like