X58 motherboard and GTX285s Only negotiating to PCIe1.1

Edit: Fixed - the problem was the 185.12 beta driver. Downgrading to 180.22 made the cards function at full speed.

Hi,

I have a new machine with an ASRock “X58 Supercomputer” motherboard (version 1.6 BIOS), i920 and 6GB of RAM, equipped with 3 Club3d GTX285 cards. The operating system is 64bit Fedora 10.

The three cards negotiate 16x, 8x, 8x links respectively, as expected, but only at PCIe 1 (2.5GT/s) speed, so the host->device bandwidth is very low.

Is this likely a problem with the GTX cards or the motherboard?

Attached are the lspci listings for the machine (only one 285 enabled in ths case) - you can see that the GPU seems to report itself as a PCIv1 capable device, rather than the v2 I’d expect.

Any ideas welcome,

Thanks,

Matt
all.doc (302 KB)
all.summary.doc (2.74 KB)
gtx285.doc (15.1 KB)

I’m actually looking to build a dual GTX 295 system with this motherboard soon (I hope). What are the bandwidthTest results with pinned and pageable memory now?

huh. I’ve got one of these boards behind me. I’ll try to bring it up soon and let you know if I see any problem. There’s no change with only one card in the machine? I know someone has tested this board and had no problems with two GPUs…

Well, I cheated a little and only disconnected the PCIe power to the two cards in the two 8x slots (2 & 3) to disable them as the chassis is a pain to work with, but that seems to be sufficient to stop the cards being recognised by the system. Performance and PCIe config seemed the same in either case.

Matt

OTOMH, about 6000MB/s to the 16x slot card, 3200 MB/s to the two 8x cards, roughly symmetric. (Pinned memory)

I’ll post exact figures later if I get the chance. Now I have it working, it’s already been put into service…

Matt

Here are my Results with SKD BandwidthTest.exe:

BUS PCIe2.0 x16
VGA Card = NVIDIA 9800GTX+
CPU = Intel Core i7 920 (Quadcore with 2,8GHz)
Memory = DDR3 1600MHz Tripple Channel Memory
operation system = Windows XP 32Bit

Memcopy from PC to GPU = 5200MByte/second
Memcopy from GPU to PC = 4700MByte/second

Is a 64Bit operation System (Vista 64Bit) better as a Windows XP 32Bit?
Get I more bandwidth with a NVIDIA 285GTX?