Placing a sound card in a 16x slot bottleneck GPUs?

[gl3nnn]

I have a MSI z87 g-45 mobo which has 3 16x slots and i'm running 2 GTX 970s in SLI. I also have a sound card which is currently above my top GPU in a 1x slot.

 

I was thinking of installing a Kraken g10 on my top GPU and i'm afraid there wont be enough clearance to place the sound card there anymore due to the G10 requiring a backplate mount to secure the bracket in place.

 

I was thinking of re-locating my sound card to the bottom most 16x slot so it will have lesser interference with the airflow of my bottom GPU. My question is will re-locating the sound card there bottleneck my 2 GPU's performance?

 

http://www.msi.com/product/mb/Z87-G45-GAMING.html#hero-specification

 

 

Thanks in advance

 

 

[MegaDave91]

How about the bottom x1 slot.

[CostcoSamples]

Yes, I think it will bottleneck somewhat.  I'm pretty sure you only have 16 PCIe gen 3 lanes, which means your 3 slots can run in any of the following configurations:

 

Gen3 (16,0,0), (8,8,0), (8,4,4)

 

Right now your dual card setup has both cards running at x8.  If you add something to the third slot, it will force the second slot down to x4.  In practice this might not make a huge difference.  I suggest running a couple of benchmarks, then move it and see if you notice much difference.

 

The difference between x16 and x8 is maybe 1% in practice, but I think from x8 to x4 it is perhaps 10% or greater.  But give it a try and see how it goes.

[FruitBasketSilex]

Yes, I think it will bottleneck somewhat. I'm pretty sure you only have 16 PCIe gen 3 lanes, which means your 3 slots can run in any of the following configurations:

Gen3 (16,0,0), (8,8,0), (8,4,4)

Right now your dual card setup has both cards running at x8. If you add something to the third slot, it will force the second slot down to x4. In practice this might not make a huge difference. I suggest running a couple of benchmarks, then move it and see if you notice much difference.

The difference between x16 and x8 is maybe 1% in practice, but I think from x8 to x4 it is perhaps 10% or greater. But give it a try and see how it goes.

He can't do that.

Sli requires x8 at the least.

[CostcoSamples]

He can't do that.

Sli requires x8 at the least.

I did not know that.  Well there is always onboard audio.

 

Also, here is a great article that tests the various PCIe speeds with a GTX 980:

 

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GTX_980_PCI-Express_Scaling/

[Glenwing]

If you use a sound card in the bottom x16 slot your graphics cards will be reduced to x8/x4. There is no performance bottleneck there, but you will not be able to enable SLI.