Spent 2 years plugging my GPU into the wrong PCIe slot

Built my first PC back in 2020 and never thought twice about which slot I put the graphics card in. I just used the top one because it was easiest to reach. Last week I was messing with fan curves in MSI Afterburner and noticed my GPU temp was fine but my frames in Cyberpunk were way lower than benchmarks I saw online. Decided to check GPU-Z and it said my card was running at x8 instead of x16. Turns out my motherboard's top slot shares lanes with the M.2 drive I had installed. Moving the GPU to the second full-length slot dropped my temps by 5 degrees and boosted my FPS by like 15%. Had no idea slot placement could matter that much. Anyone else learn this the hard way or was I just being dense?

2 comments

2 Comments

danielmartinez17d ago

Hold up, is a 15% fps boost really that noticeable in most games though? I mean, maybe if you're chasing every single frame in Cyberpunk with a high refresh monitor you'd see it, but idk if most people would even tell the difference in regular play. Plus, temps dropping 5 degrees is nice but not exactly a game changer unless you were hitting thermal limits before. Feels like one of those things that sounds huge on paper but in practice you'd probably be fine either way.

tylerw7217d agoTop Commenter

Is it really that serious though? I get that numbers are fun to obsess over but you're right, 15% is one of those things you'd maybe feel in a benchmark and then forget about five minutes into actually playing the game. Like if you're going from 85 to 100 fps in Valorant, are you really gonna notice that mid-round or are you just gonna keep dying to the same Jett main anyway? And the temp drop, unless your fans were sounding like a leaf blower before, you probably weren't even thinking about it. Feels like this whole update is for people who already have the monitoring overlay on 24/7 and need something to tweak.