Hi I ordered some parts to make a new computer the other day, and the motherboard said it had a pci-ex16 slot, so I ordered a graphics card, a sapphire x1550, that uses pci-e x16. I have since found out that the slot on the motherboard has the x16 form factor, so the card will fit, but only runs at x8 bandwidth. Can anyone tell me, will the graphics card still work OK, will it suffer a big hit on performance? Thanks very much

"will the graphics card still work OK, will it suffer a big hit on performance?" It depends on what you mean by OK. The x8 vs x16 issue is really a non-issue, but the X1550 was a poor choice. I hope you didn't buy it for gaming....

I'm building this for my girlfriend and mainly wanted something cheap that would avoid the problem of an integrated card sharing and slowing the system memory. I realise that compared to what's on offer an x1550 is hardly cutting edge, but it's mainly a working machine, with the exception of the Sims 2, which I'm hoping is old enough to run reasonably well on it, as it's fine on my machine with an x1600 which is lower spec in every other way. Anyway, so long as the x8 bandwidth isn't going to cause problems, that's fine. Thanks again

The X1600 is a MUCH better card than the X1550, especially if the X1550 uses hypermemory. And I believe the X1550 has just 4 pipelines compared to 12 for the X1600, plus it uses a 64-bit memory interface with GDDR2. Depending on which X1600 you have, it *may* have GDDR3 @ 128-bit. If you look at the system requirements for most of the newer games, they explicitly state "X1550 not supported"

Why do you feel the specs of the system are not applicable. I believe that you are misreading the specs of the PCIe slots but can't say for sure without the board model.

How do you mean specs not applicable? As far as I was concerned, I had a pci-e x16 slot, which meant x16 bandwidth to me, so I bought a card that said it used x16, then I found out all I had was x8 bandwidth with a bit of plastic on top that could hold a x16 card, so I just wanted to check this wouldn't cause problems. Turns out the card is crap anyway it seems...Oh well. If the sims 2 manages to run on it, all is well. I wish that companies wouldn't use such misleading naming conventions. It would seem intuitive to me that an x1550 should be only slightly worse than an x1600. I think mine is an x1600 pro btw, with 512MB of GDDR2 on it. While I'm here, out of interest, If I had bought a card supporting DX10, which I understand is for Vista only, would it have run OK under XP on DX9? Thanks again