Hi all,
New to the forum and I’m hoping you can teach me abit about PCI lanes.
My PC is a 3800x with a MSI B450 Tomahawk MB, 16GB RAM with the following PCI Devices
X1 Vega 56
X1 R9 270
X1 USB Hub
X1 NVME SSD
The reason I have 2 GPUs is that, this is a SIM racing PC and with all 5 screens plugged into the Vega I started to get stutter issues. All solved by using the R9 270 to just run my 2 additional screens.
My question is, I would like to add and Elgato HD Pro (or similar) into this for recording a camera “over the shoulder” for my racing but I’m not sure if i’ve actually got enough PCI lanes…?
I did note in GPUZ that my R9 was running at 2x speed with the vega at full 16x.
2x is fine as these screens only show a dash and discord/chrome window.
You have “enough”, with the caveat that everything aside from your Vega 56 and your SSD will share a total of 4x PCIe 2.0 lanes.
By having a second GPU, a USB card, and a capture card you will be limited to x2 lanes at most for any single device, the other two will have a single lane.
Like the picture in @MazeFrame’s post shows, the bottom three slots will run x1/x2/x1 respectively.
Using a game framebuffer across 2 cards is almost never a good idea for simply playing a game. However if the 2 other displays aren’t driving the game, you’re fine.
X570 might be helpful for more PCH bandwidth if you need it.
Your better bet is to use a Elgato Cam Link rather than a HD60 since it’s over the USB bus.
Yeah, I just use the extra GPU for driving the screens, they’re not used for gaming at all. I use the 2 extra screens for a dashboard and things like discord or standings during the race.
Just did a 24hr race so you end up being driver, crew chief and anything in between.
The reason I was after the HD60Pro was due to its hardware encoder. I want to take as much load of the rest of the PC as possible.
My recommendation is get a motherboard that supports your current hardware and has 2 PCIe x16 @ 16 slots and then get a mini ITX board with at least 1 PCIe x16 slot and a CPU with integrated graphics and set it up for capture unless you want to move to a Threadripper setup which would cost significantly more. Or if quality and latency is not as important for you can get a USB capture device. USB capture should be fine for 1080p 60hz. Alternatively you could get a 5xxx XT that supports hardware encoding and dump the R9 270 but you will still need to get a new motherboard for that option… Hope that helps.
I’d definitely given both thought.
My issue with the USB encoder is that the lag was alway inconsistent meaning that I had to resync the audio everytime. Though the newer USB3 ones seems to be real time.
A second PC is possible but thats a cost thing. My other desktop is too far away.
I think I’ll try the HD60Pro on PCI and if I need to get a mini PC built then I’ll consider that.
