PCIe x1 question on P67 UD-7 Board

[Thesurgeon]

Hello,

I have been visiting the boards for a couple weeks, I have a question:

     I would like to purchase a P67 UD-7 board, the picture of the PCIe x1 slot looks like I wont be able to fit the creative sound card I would like to purchase its a: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Professional 70SB088600002 7.1 Channels 24-bit 96KHz PCI Express x1 Interface Sound Card. To me it looks like the motherboard heat sink is not going to allow the card to seat into the PCIe slot, in other words the bottom of the sound card is going to bump on the top of the heat sink. Would this be the case or am I mistaken.

   I would also like to implement a VisionTek Bigfoot Killer 2100 Gaming Network Card which is PCIe x1 card as well.

Thank you for any feedback,

Sincerely

 

[Jivenjune]

There's an extremely limited amount of space on the upper most PCI-Express 1x slot at the top of the board. It is extremely unlikely that either of these will fit into that PCI x1 slot due to the heatsink being raised. It cuts off the length at the exact spot where a PCI x1 slot is inserted leaving only roughly about a quarter to half an inch extra spacing. The most you can do with this is slot is use it for a wireless pci x1 card that can fit into that slot perfectly. The E8000 TV Tuner by Gigabyte would also fit in there; however, I have no idea if those are even available (or exist...)

[Dark Mantis]

Hi and welcome to the Gigabyte Forum.

Jivenjune is quite right about the lack of space on the x1 slot but ignore it as you can use any of the other PCIE slots that are available. The card will fit into a PCIEx4, x8, x16 slot also so you should be able to find a spare slot to install it.

I have just built up a P67A-UD5 and it seems to be a very nice board althouigh of course the UD7 comes with even more features and is an excellent motherboard.

[Thesurgeon]

Thanks for the info,

     I am intending to SLI my GPU's in the x16 slots, then install a spare GTS 450 into the remaining PCIE slot as a dedicated Physyx card and install the sound card into the remaining PCIE slot. Will this set up down grade the SLI x16's to x8 due to the extra bandwith?

This is my first build, I apologies for any dumb questions.

Sincerely,

[Dark Mantis]

Not a dumb question at all my friend.

If you are installing two PCI Express graphics cards, it is recommended that you install them in the PCIEX16_1 and PCIEX16_2 slots for optimum perfoerformance  however if you then add another card into the PCIEX8_1 slot  that shares bandwidth with the PCIEX16_1 slot and will bring that down to an X8 equivalent. That shouldn't actually harm your throughput though as that is enough for a GPU.

[Thesurgeon]

Thanks Dark Mantis, thats what I thought from reading the specs on the UD 7 board, but I just had to ask to be sure..

I am going to start a new thread regarding my first build.and any suggestions would be welcome

[Dark Mantis]

Glad to be of service. You can check my Living Review here :

http://forum.giga-byte.co.uk/index.php/topic,4776.0.html

and we have more info in general in the FAQ section of the forum.