So I just ordered a GTX 780 and read that it's rated for PCI Express 3. This is all fine and dandy however here is my problem, my MOBO is PCI Express 1.1. Now the question remains, do I keep it and will it be fine, should I drop another $600 to get a new MOBO and everything else required (RAM, Processor, etc.). I was all exicted now I'm kind of worried that it's a waste of money. Any advice or tips would be greatly appreciated thanks.
Whoa!!! Why would you buy a new video card without checking or knowing your mobo specs?
ANYWAYS... Yes, it is definitely worth it to upgrade. I'm assuming your processor is ancient as well? If it is, then this GPU would probably bottleneck anyways... Can you post your build specs?
Hey I'll take that computer off your hands if you dont need it:P
You processor should be fine, but the interface is probably going to a bit of a bottleneck. If you could sell off your current mobo+ram+cpu, and upgrade, you would see some pretty decent improvements, I would think.
Here we go. The bottlenecking will be a bit more with the 780 than with the 680 seeing as how the 780 is a better card.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Intel/Ivy_Bridge_PCI-Express_Scaling/23.html
i7 extreme, 4 old ass video cards, put it on sale on craigslist for $2k you could probably find some idiot to buy it *i'm only slightly kidding*
but yeah, that pcie 1 is going to be a problem
If it was me, I'd just roll with it until you want to upgrade your CPU. There would be a bit of a performance drop, but it's probably not going to be huge, like maybe a maximum of 20% decrease in performance because of the PCIe 1.1 compared to 3.0. And given the 780 is super powerful anyway, until your CPU performance is too low for your liking, I would just stick with what you've got at the moment.
I recently built my first PC, and did a fair bit of research into the differences between PCIe 2.0 and 3.0, and in that found that it's miniscule, and even PCIe 1 is still fairly viable. In fact, from memory, in high performance cards, the drop between PCIe 2.0 and 3.0 was only at most 5%, and PCIe 2.0 x8 was virtually no difference to PCIe 2.0 x16 (PCIe 2.0 x8 is the same bandwidth as PCIe 1.1).
So if it was me, I wouldn't rush into buying new parts. Even if you do have a worst case 20% performance drop, the GPU is still amazing even running at 80% of it's capabilities, so you shouldn't see any issues in being able to run new games. I'd only upgrade if your not happy with the CPU performance.
Wow, PCIe 1.1 x4 even holds up remarkably well :O
Just find a x58 board second hand cause that cpu is a beast! Those just scream "overclock the shit out of me!!" Something like a Asus P6T shouldnt be too hard to find.
Hmmm alienware... do I dare ask what kind of turd psu they threw in there?
Where did you see pci-e 1.1? x58 boards should have native support for 2.0.
+1 that's what I was thinking.
wiht a bit of google your board has 2.0 slots keep what you have