Quote Originally Posted by orangekiwii View Post
I've never heard of this bug. Are there any reviews are articles on it?

Just curious if I upgrade whether my Asus P5Q Deluxe will limit the card due to some silly hardware issue.
Sadly I am not aware of any reviewers doing articles on this, but there is a 10 page thread on the ASUS forums, and a thread on the nVidia forums. Some members of XtremeSystems have also been helping me prove to ASUS support that the issue is with their motherboards and not (as ASUS support initially claimed) nVidia drivers.

To cut a long story short, in July 2009 Intel released BIOS updates for their motherboards which resolved an issue with PCI-E Gen 2.0 compliance on 2x 2.0x16 motherboards.

P45 was unaffected by this bug, so people using those motherboards have never experienced this issue.

I have provided ASUS with GPU-Z screen shots, everest screen shots and links to Intel BIOS release information which documents the fix. However ASUS support have not done anything about resolving this issue.

My advice is that if you are planning on upgrading you should stick to either Intel's own brand motherboard, or a third party motherboard which does not have this issue. Sadly most, if not all third party boards are affected as manufactures like Gigabyte have moved on from providing BIOS updates for the X38/X48 platform.

I would not be surprised if one of the causes of these erratic results at high resolution and lower than expected performance in some games was caused by this bug.

GTX 480 would likely use more PCI-E Bandwidth than a GTX 280.

Would be interesting to see a review (if any) that used the Intel DX58SO motherboard.

John