[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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