Changing motherboard, question about the pci-e lanes

[CaptainSpalding]

My unraid mobo seems to be dead and I'm thinking of changing it to the mobo from my main PC.

 

It's P5Q-E and has 3 pci-e ports (16 lanes), but from what I have read with 3 cards installed the speeds are x8, x8 and x4... I have understood this board cannot operate headless, so I'm left with the x8 and x4 speeds for controller cards.

 

The failed mobo had 28 lanes (P5N32-E SLI / x16, x8, x8) in 3 pci-e ports and I got around 60Mb/s for parity check. Is this going to be much slower with this P5Q-E?

 

I have 2 AOC-SASLP-MV8's and did had 6 on board sata ports.

 

 

Thanks!

 

 

[DoeBoye]

The AOC-SASLP-MV8 is a 4x board, so running it in a 4x slot, 8x slot or a 16x slot won't yield any difference in performance. Theoretically, the 2 cards should perform the same or nearly the same as they did on the old board...

 

The only thing that may be problematic is if the P5Q-E does not let PCI-e cards other then Video Cards run in its 16x (mechanical) slots. This has been  a problem in the past. For a while, some manufacturers, in their infinite wisdom, were crippling the 16x slots to only support video cards...

 

DB

[Zen]

I own a P5Q-E and can confirm that it works fine with a video card in a slot other than the primary x16 slot.  I've successfully run systems with a video card in the second or third x16 slots as well as in a PCI slot.

 

One important point to note is that if you use any of the x1 slots, then the third x16 slot will be reduced from x4 speed to x1.

 

I would suggest putting the AOC-SASLP-MV8 cards in the first two x16 slots and your video card in the third x16 slot.  I've run it in that configuration before and had no problems with it.

[CaptainSpalding]

Thanks a lot guys!