Thread: Placement of 16x lanes on MSI X58A-GD65 motherboard

Hi Pada,

I very recently purchased one of these boards for my setup so I might be able to assist.
I'm currently running 2 x 5870's (crossfire) in the two upper most PCI-E 16x slots (PCI_E2 and PCI_E4) and according to GPU-Z both cards are running at 16x so we could safetly assume that these are the two 16x capable slots.

However is it not possible that these slots are scalable i.e. if you have GFX cards in slots PCI_E2 and PCI_E5 then PCI-4 automatically clocks down to 4x? I've not tried throwing one of my 5870's in the lowest PCI-E slot but I've been thinking about it since I'd prefer a bit more space between the two cards.

I'll maybe give it a bash in the next few days and post my findings here for you....if you haven't received the info from someone else first that is.

Thanks HiToKiRi. I think that the PCI_E5 is actually fixed on 4x then.

Damin, from Carbonite, said that GPU-z is reporting that both his cards ( GTX 470 and 9800 GT) are running @ 16x and he's running it in the top & bottom PCIe slots!

Thats pretty good news. More noddy points for this mobo!

I must admit that being an ASUS fan I was a bit reluctant to go for an MSI board but this was the only "affordable" X58 motherboard I could find that had a standard PCI slot right at the bottom of the board (I have an ASUS Xonar D1 PCI sound card which I wanted to continue using) as most of the other X58 boards only have one PCI slot sitting right between the first two PCI-E 16x slots. Since it also comes with a 3 year warranty, I thought "what the hell, might as well try it" and so far I'm very happy.

Very solid board.

If I knew about this board, I wouldn't have bought my Asus P6T Deluxe v2 2nd-hand, which cost me considerably more than what this MSI motherboard goes for!