Jump to content

660p full PCI-E dilemma

Earthlyhuman
 Share
Posted

Was doing a Dell inspiron 660p upgrade, and did not boot with the full size graphics card (HD5870). Luckily , this cpu has integrated graphics with the i5 3330. I went ahead and upgraded the bios to the latest revision (a13) and still was not working. 

 

Things i tried swapping 

Power supply: used a 500w rosewill and a 650w cooler master

 

Graphics card: gt 310, hd5870, hd7950, gt710.These all worked on my little tesbench.

 

Interesting thing was, the gt 710 is not a full pcie card, and it worked(its like pciex8 or something). All the others are full pcie 16 cards.

 

And yes, i plugged in the external pcie connectors. 

 

I don't know much about these OEM bioses and stuff, so there.might be something I'm missing, but hopefully the board isn't broken.

Full spec:

Dell inspiron 660 oem motherboard

Intel i5 3330

St3500630ns 500gb hdd

VAPOR Radeon HD 5870

Rosewill rd500-2db 500w psu

Micron 1600mhz 2x4gb ddr3 memory

16501461425122058454609711053593.jpg

16501463100529216909034920538763.jpg

16501463664607031521473886538174.jpg

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Link to post
Share on other sites
Posted
22 hours ago, Earthlyhuman said:

Interesting thing was, the gt 710 is not a full pcie card, and it worked(its like pciex8 or something). All the others are full pcie 16 cards.

 

The i5-3330 only has 16 pcie lanes. The HDD will use 2 or 4. The WiFi module (if you still have it installed) will use 2 or 4. Do you have an option in the BIOS to force the x16 slot to x8? You could also unplug the HDD and remove the WiFi module and see if it'll let you boot into BIOS with more lanes going to the GPU. 

I'm not actually trying to be as grumpy as it seems.

I will find your mentions of Ikea or Gnome and I will /s post. 

Project Hot Box

CPU 13900k, Motherboard Gigabyte Aorus Elite AX, RAM CORSAIR Vengeance 4x16gb 5200 MHZ, GPU Zotac RTX 4090 Trinity OC, Case Fractal Pop Air XL, Storage Sabrent Rocket Q4 2tb, CORSAIR Force Series MP510 1920GB NVMe, CORSAIR FORCE Series MP510 960GB NVMe, PSU CORSAIR HX1000i, Cooling Corsair XC8 CPU block, Bykski GPU block, 360mm and 280mm radiator, Displays Odyssey G9, LG 34UC98-W 34-Inch,Keyboard Mountain Everest Max, Mouse Mountain Makalu 67, Sound AT2035, Massdrop 6xx headphones, Go XLR 

Oppbevaring

CPU i9-9900k, Motherboard, ASUS Rog Maximus Code XI, RAM, 48GB Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB 3200 mhz (2x16)+(2x8) GPUs Asus ROG Strix 2070 8gb, PNY 1080, Nvidia 1080, Case Mining Frame, 2x Storage Samsung 860 Evo 500 GB, PSU Corsair RM1000x and RM850x, Cooling Asus Rog Ryuo 240 with Noctua NF-12 fans

 

Why is the 5800x so hot?

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Link to post
Share on other sites
Posted
  • Author
57 minutes ago, IkeaGnome said:

The i5-3330 only has 16 pcie lanes. The HDD will use 2 or 4. The WiFi module (if you still have it installed) will use 2 or 4. Do you have an option in the BIOS to force the x16 slot to x8? You could also unplug the HDD and remove the WiFi module and see if it'll let you boot into BIOS with more lanes going to the GPU. 

I was about to give up on this, but that is a good idea. Considering this board has an installed wifi card, I will try to remove it. Also, the bios on this board s limited, and I've pretty much scanned through everything and didn't see many options to change.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Link to post
Share on other sites
Posted

The guy above is wrong... the HDD will not use 2 or 4, the Wifi module will not use 2 or 4 ... that's stupid.

 

The CPU has its own pci-e lanes, and the chipset creates its own pci-e lanes and the chipset has a dedicated connection to the cpu.

The sata controller is built into the chipset and doesn't use those pci-e lanes created by cpu.  The wireless card will probably use a single pci-e lane created by the chipset.

 

The pci-e slot may have up to 16 pci-e lanes in it. It doesn't have to, the actual pci-e lanes inside the slot can be different than the size of the pci-e slot - I mean could be physically a pci-e x16 slot, but there may be only 4 or 8 pci-e lanes in it.

Video cards and pci-e devices in general are designed and supposed to work with as few pci-e lanes as possible and be flexible about the number of pci-e lanes, so in theory a video card could run in a pci-e x1 slot, or a pci-e x4 slot, or a pci-e x8 slot or a pci-e x16 slot.  The card shouldn't care.

 

There are SOME known exceptions... typically SCSI controllers or high end network cards (for example a network card with 2 x 10gbps ports may refuse to work in a slot with only 1 pci-e lane, because that single pci-e lane only provides around 950 MB/s and two 10g ports require at least 2.5 GB/s)

 

In your particular case, I suspect it's just some Dell BIOS quirks or an issue about the Dell BIOS not having UEFI support ...

 

I know for sure some AMD cards had UEFI firmware on them (bios on the video card) which means the video card would not initialize if the BIOS on the motherboard has no UEFI features.  So with old motherboards with basic bios with no UEFI stuff built in, such cards won't work.

RX 4xx and newer from AMD use UEFI firmware, RTX 2xxx and newer from nVIdia use UEFI firmware ... previous stuff should work even on old systems.

 

There are some rare video cards that have their firmware customized and locked for some systems, HP were known for this.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
 Share
Go to topic listing Troubleshooting

×