Hi Manel

I do not know exactly what the specifics were, but I and a few members on the official ASUS forums were experiencing issues with our nVidia cards not always working @ PCI-E Gen 2.0. on P5E3 (x38) based motherboards. Sometimes our cards would work @ PCI-E Gen 2.0 and other times they would not.

At the time I was also able to reproduce the issue on a DX38BT (BIOS 1197)
Eventually I had enough reproduceable results from people with all sorts of graphics cards (G92, G200, G200b, G92b) to prove that this issue was somehow linked to the motherboard as opposed to the graphics card. (as P45 based boards had no issues whatsover).

A reboot usually resolved the issue, that was until the first forceware 190 drivers were release. Then we lost all PCI-E Gen 2.0 capabilities. Not only does GPU-Z, Everest and nVidia control panel report our cards as PCI-Express 1.1 cards, but also Scores in 3dmark were reduced and WEI reduced on Windows 7.

Further testing was done with 191.07, 195.62WHQL and 195.81. However using older forceware drivers from the 18x series brought back the intemitant "sometimes it works, sometimes it defaults back to 1.1" issue.

After several bug reports and discussing the issue with ASUS, I received a statement from ASUS forwarded to them from nVidia quoting that a bug in the Intel BIOS meant nVidia had to disable PCI-E Gen 2.0 support on the X38 platform.

I have a hunch that intel resolved this issue in SMBIOS 2.4? boards (would this be July 2009 BIOS update).

I have read (and relayed on information to ASUS and nVidia) that BIOS 2006 release notes under the "2000" release section, list this fix.

"Updated support for high power PCIe adapters."

Presumably this resolves the issue with the BIOS and Gen 2.0 support. (I think it is a slot capability detection issue, but do not quote me on this).

A screen cap of GPU-Z would be most appreciated as ASUS and nVidia are in "denial" that Intel have fixed this issue.

Thanks

John