Thread: Good Tidbit of Information on New Graphics Cards Out

So I recently purchased a new 9800 gx2. I received it yesterday and was excited to put it in my dell xps 700. Sadly I could not. Even though my Power Supply is 1000Watts, it only has 6 pin pcie power adapters. The 9800 gx2 and I'm assuming other new cards require both a 6 pin and an 8 pin supplemental power adapter.

So just be aware of this issue. The new power supplies out there do have the 8 pin, but if you have one made roughly over a year or so ago it will not.

There is a potential solution I am going to try out by purchasing a $10 piece, which is a 6-8 pin adapter for my older power supply to work with the newer card(s). It is here in case you might need one....

ttp://www.frozencpu.com/products/6088/cab-97/6_Pin_PCI-E_to_8_Pin_PCI-E2_Adapter_Cable.html?tl=g11c28s427

Also, since I have the original pci-e 16x slot I was curious about reading how much hinderence this would have on my new card since many of the newer mobo's have the gen 2 slot. Here is some technical information:

GeForce 9800 GX2

On 18 March 2008 the GeForce 9800 GX2 was officially launched.

The GeForce 9800 GX2 is reported to have the following specifications: [12][13].

* Dual PCBs, dual GPU design
* 197 W power consumption [14].
* Two 65nm process GPUs, with 256 total Stream Processors (128 per PCB)[15].
* The 9800 GX2 is at least 30% faster than the 8800 Ultra.
* Supports Quad SLI.
* 1 GiB (512 MB per PCB) memory framebuffer.
* Supports DirectX 10, Shader Model 4, OpenGL 2.1, and PCI-Express 2.0.
* Outputs include two DVI ports, an HDMI output, and S/PDIF in connector on-board for routing audio through the HDMI cable [16].
* An 8-pin and a 6-pin power connector.
* Clocks (Core/Shader/Memory): 600 MHz/1500 MHz/2000 MHz [17]
* 256-bit memory interface[17]
* 128 GB/s memory bandwidth[17]
* Released date: March 18, 2008
* Launch price of $599 [18].

PCI-E 1.1 buses have a signaling rate of 2.5 GT/s (Gigatransfers per second) per lane, which divided by 10 (encoding overhead) results in 250 MB/s per lane. Since the PCI-E buses support equal bidirectional transfer rates, upstream and downstream rates are identical. By multiplying the maximum (theoretical) bandwidth by the number of functional lanes you can find the bandwidth potential of that slot. For example, a 16x slot has a maximum transfer rate of 4.0 GB/s while an 8x slot has a 2.0 GB/s rate. The PCI-E 2.0 bus operates at twice the speed of a 1.1 bus (500 MHz as opposed to 250 MHz, both with a 10x multplier,) effectively doubling the bandwidth ceiling from 250 MB/s/lane to 500 MB/s/lane, thus doubling the theoretical maximum rates of 16x slots to 8.0 GB/s, 8x slots to 4.0 GB/s, and so on.


PCIe gen. 1 = 2500mhz
PCIe gen. 2 = 5000mhz (when paired with a PCIe 2.0 card)


So in essence it appears the pcie-2 offers great bandwidth but you probably won't realize these highways until later upgrades on cards.