[wplug] Motherboard mutilation
Michael A. Smith
michael at smith-li.com
Sat Mar 5 19:17:04 EST 2005
I bought a Dell PowerEdge SC420. Nice computer, got it for around $200
last November. Instead of AGP, it came with PCI-Express. The motherboard
has 16x printed on it next to the PCI-E slot.
Well, I guess I didn't do all the research I should have on PCI-Express
before I bought a 16x graphics card, because I really thought I had a
16x PCI-Express slot. Unfortunately when the card came it didn't fit!
Oddly, the PCI slot was the same length as the 16x PCI-E slot, except
for a plastic divider in the slot, and the pins that would have been in
a 16x slot were missing after the divider. It turns out the PowerEdge
SC420 has 8x PCI-E.
Undaunted and a little psychopathic, I took the advice of one forum
poster who said that the graphics card could slow down to 8x, and that
8x PCI-Express is faster than 8x AGP, so I'd still get a performance
gain. So I gouged out the plastic divider on the motherboard.
After four hours of careful work I managed to get the card to fit in the
16x-sized 8x slot, and shockingly the computer booted without complaint.
Now, I've got nvidia-glx running, but I'm only able to get about 200FPS
with glxgears (at its default size). For the time being I'm satisfied
that I didn't completely break my computer, but I did hear that 8x PCI-E
is supposed to outperform AGP, so "where's the beef"?
Is anyone on the list using a PCI Express graphics card? Did you have to
do anything special to set it up?
TIA,
Mike
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