Forcing 16x card to 4x speed

E

Epyon

[H]ard|Gawd
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Oct 25, 2001
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I do 3d rendering and a little gaming. I saw YT video saying 16x to 4x you lose about 10 frames a sec. From my reading If I wanted to add 3x 8TB nvme drives and say 3x sata 8TB drives. That would force the video card down to 8x or 4x correct? There is no way to manually set it to run at 4x?

I will be going with AMD on the next round as I am on intel and it blows.

13900k
4090
64gb ram
win 10

The new TR chips just are not doing it for me speed wise. meh
 
It will depend on the board you have. As an example. Some of the Intel boards like the Asus Gaming z790 board, your Top most full length PCIe slot only shares with the PCIe 5 M.2 that is directly above it. So if you run a M.2 drive off that slot, it will split that 16x PCIE 5 lane into 2 8x lanes for each device. The rest of the PCIe Lanes and M.2 slots are attached to the chipset that then patch into the CPU. So its really going to depend on what board you have. All that being said, you can generally lock down a PCIe Slot in the BIOS to rate limit to 16x, 8x, 4x ect.
 

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Thanks for that. Looking it over now. I also bought a nvme external and two sata external encloser that will be coming tomorrow. Going to move my steam game to the external drive and both 8TB sata drives and do some testing.
 
Going below x8 doesn't net you any more lanes to play with as the chip doesn't support further bifurcation. That said, you can definitely manually limit PCIe rate by putting Kapton tape on the PCIe connector pins of the card to block off the higher lane counts (see a Wikipedia diagram to find out where).

Now, if you are adventurous, you can use an m.2 to PCIe x4 adapter for the CPU supplied PCIe4x4 m.2 slot and run your GPU in that while using a 4xM.2 expansion cards in the x16 slot.
 
Epyon said:
I do 3d rendering and a little gaming. I saw YT video saying 16x to 4x you lose about 10 frames a sec. From my reading If I wanted to add 3x 8TB nvme drives and say 3x sata 8TB drives. That would force the video card down to 8x or 4x correct? There is no way to manually set it to run at 4x?

I will be going with AMD on the next round as I am on intel and it blows.

13900k
4090
64gb ram
win 10

The new TR chips just are not doing it for me speed wise. meh
Click to expand...
What's all the space for?

If you don't need all of it as persistent storage, I would have some of it as external. And simply plug it in as needed. So as to maintain the performance you payed $1500 for.
 
I was using 1 sata 870 evo 8TB drive to move around computer to computer the other as storage and porn. one nvme drive game and other other nvme as storage and working cache drive for Houdini 3d program.

nvme were not 8TB drives. I have those encloser coming today So like you said I bet i can slim all this down. and replace all nvme drives to 8TB and won't even need sata in the computer.
 
Epyon said:
I was using 1 sata 870 evo 8TB drive to move around computer to computer the other as storage and porn. one nvme drive game and other other nvme as storage and working cache drive for Houdini 3d program.

nvme were not 8TB drives. I have those encloser coming today So like you said I bet i can slim all this down. and replace all nvme drives to 8TB and won't even need sata in the computer.
Click to expand...
What’s the porn to storage ratio? Asking for a friend
 
Randall Stephens said:
What’s the porn to storage ratio? Asking for a friend
Click to expand...
Quit a bit I'm afraid. It is porn hub and paid sites but the videos are trimmed to the "action shots" with lossless cut and then ran in topaz ai then back out to av1 videos. The paid sites do not need the topaz program.
 
Also, The Ugreen sata external cage will work with the 8TB samsung 870 and not the picture they have that says 6GB max.
 
Subject matter jokes aside (I won't make any, I've had similar requests from my Marketing dept at work), my mind immediately goes 3 places:

1) Where is your current bottleneck? Is it the NVMe write speed and your 4090 is underutilized (I'm assuming Topaz AI is CUDA accelerated?)
2) Like chameleoneel said, is having a dedicated write area for the speed then transferring that finalized work to "longer term" storage not an option? That longer term storage could be anything, even not local. You mentioned moving data from PC to PC, why is a NAS/networked storage not an option?
3) Have you considered a dedicated rendering/storage rig with a proper CPU/mobo with the lanes to accommodate all the additional storage requirements? Idk if this constitutes as a reliable source of income for you, or how consistently you're doing this type of work, but a cost-analysis of your time saved offloading this work to a properly setup machine very well could justify the cost of a dedicated rig. We see this all the time at work, Engineers so concerned with skimping on their HW to save a buck up front (or skim under approval/justification thresholds) they forget they themselves are being paid an "hourly" rate and their idle time easily justifies the "pricey" hardware.
 
Epyon said:
I do 3d rendering and a little gaming. I saw YT video saying 16x to 4x you lose about 10 frames a sec. From my reading If I wanted to add 3x 8TB nvme drives and say 3x sata 8TB drives. That would force the video card down to 8x or 4x correct? There is no way to manually set it to run at 4x?

I will be going with AMD on the next round as I am on intel and it blows.

13900k
4090
64gb ram
win 10

The new TR chips just are not doing it for me speed wise. meh
Click to expand...
The AMD desktop processors are in the same boat, in that they lack enough pcie lanes to run everything full throttle. 20, or 24 lanes, that's it.

For large storage, you might want to build a NAS instead, put a few nvme's in and configure as read cache, it's pretty nice. Gonna be pricey depending on how much space you want.

If you want all of the storage in the machine, get a pcie card that will support 4 to 6 nvme's, and can run with 8 lanes. Assuming your mobo will allow you to run the GPU in x8 mode, and the added storage in x8, that's about the best you can expect.

Threadripper has plenty of lanes but is much slower for some tasks. Hardware Unboxed just put out a video the other day reviewing threadripper performance in the workstation type apps like cinebench as well as in several games. A $200 AMD 7600 cpu was beating it in most games... that tells you how shit they are for gaming.

The pcie cards that can host multiple nvme's have a pcie bridge on them that lets them share the lanes. So as long as you don't need simultaneous full speed access from all drives at once, it should work well.

But as far as manually setting the bios, depends on your mobo. I'm on a ASUS, and I can set the lanes top x16,x0,x4, x8,x8,x0 with lanes diverted to the second nvme slot.
 
Jokes aside:

I am moving large files from my main PC to the 2nd PC to do 3d render work so I cache out the project on my main and then walk to the next room to copy files over so it can render that project over night or over 2 days. I am also ripping 4k ultra blu rays so i can start hand braking them but even a 13900k is to slow even for av1 and HB 1.7 But also need one of the nvme drives for caching projects out and it can take up some room. I also have a shit ton of all YT videos or just videos in general that when you start going to town with topaz video ai with zero compression takes up some space. So if i can clear up some lanes as i did with the 2x 8TB I am hoping I can buy 3x 8TB drive and run that with my 4090 in my main and let the other 4090 just work in the other system.

The ugreen sata external BTW is giving me 530mb writes with the new apple iphone 4k $60 what ever cord.

Now that PCI -E that can run 4x at 8x lain sounds nice. Do most of them do that? What wording would I be looking out for?
 
Epyon said:
I am also ripping 4k ultra blu rays so i can start hand braking them but even a 13900k is to slow even for av1 and HB 1.7 But also need one of the nvme drives for caching projects out and it can take up some room.
Click to expand...
Have you tried doing that on a 4090? The quality for the same bitrate won't be quite as good. But its pretty dang close. And the speed increase would be worth it, if you are converting a library of discs.
 
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