My Glorto GT 610 is reported as running at PCIe 2.0 x8 rather than PCIe 2.0 x16 on my motherboard. Could the motherboard or graphics card be causing this? Is it worth troubleshooting, especially since the GT 730 also uses an x8 interface and offers roughly twice the performance?
3 Answers
Many GT 610 models are only electrically wired for fewer lanes, even if the connector is physically full-length. Some versions were also made for older PCI slots. The card itself may simply be designed this way rather than there being a motherboard fault.
It probably won’t make any noticeable difference. The GT 610 is so limited that it’s unlikely to saturate even eight PCIe 2.0 lanes, so x8 versus x16 should have little to no effect on real-world performance.
The GT 730 is faster mainly because it uses a newer GPU design and, depending on the model, has more or faster memory—not because of the PCIe lane count. Neither card is likely to benefit meaningfully from the full bandwidth of PCIe 2.0 x16, so fixing the x8 link probably isn’t worth the effort.
There are GT 610 variants that can operate with only a couple of PCIe lanes and lose very little performance. That makes an x8 reading unsurprising for this class of card.