Anybody else had a dying pcie slot?

Hi guys need your help or advice or whatever ^^

Last weekend I used my rig, watched some AC replays, all like every day, then switched it off. And a few hours later when I wanted to drive a couple of laps and switched it on again all I see was a frozen BIOS screen. All fans were running, the LED light of the GPU was glowing. First I thought maybe it was jumped a little bit out of the slot or some dust went into it, but no way to get it working. Booting with the Intel built-in GPU was no problem, but my 980 wasn't also recognized by Windows.

Searching the web shows only problems of guys buying new cards and having problem the first time because of old bios firmware. I tried this also, tried switching some settings they mentioned there (setting the generation detection from auto to Gen-3 and such stuff), but no way to get it working again. I was so afraid that my 980 died that I putted it into another pcie slot and there it works like a charme again.

So some luck for me I thought because the GPU was alive and mainboards are not so expensive, but the times that I were deep into all this hardware stuff is over for a long time already. So there are no socket 1155 boards anymore to buy, except of some micro ATX but I don't think it will be a good idea to put my stressed hardware so close together (especially when we are heading for summer and then it's getting hot in here) and I doubt my big cpu cooler will fit ^^ And on the other hand maybe finding such an old board or buy a used one feels like throw money out of the window.

The problem is the working slot is only a x4 one and first when I read that this makes not that much difference (couple percents) I thought yeah Ok maybe I can live with this. But no way with triples... The lost of performance is around 15% and more, no way to get stable 16 FPS while hotlapping. So what to do now? Had somebody maybe an similar problems and knows a trick what I maybe missed to try? Should I really invest some money for 4 years old hardware? Or should I take it as an excuse and upgrade to Skylake and DDR4 (but this is also not cheap and benchmarks I saw were saying only 30% more CPU power between a i7-6770K and my i7-3770K).

Thx for any hint or advice in advance

 

Search around the net for old/used motherboards. 1155's should be around for decent prices. Depending where you live, there are usually local sites where people post to sell their hardware, you might even find a motherboard in your own town, pay them a visit, see if it is working well... And if it is working, it will probably work for quite some time more

 

Ah forget to mention that I think the problem could be just a mixture of old hardware which get weak with the time and a modern fat GPU which sucks the power out of this slot near the limit of the pcie specification. And I was never a fan of used hardware... Buy new, get guarantee that it will work...

 

Before you spend money upgrading/changing your motherboard, I would test the 16x slot with another card. I've had 2 Nvidia cards over the years decide they didn't like running at full bus bandwidth, but worked fine in a slower slot.

 

It worked for over half a year now. I bought the 980 when it was released to get eyecandy back after upgrading to triples.

 

What PSU do you have and how old is it?

 

oh oh oh ive seen this before.

Generally ive not ever seen a bad pci-e lane or slot unless there was visual damage due to user being silly. Now ive only seen this once but in my experience it was a bad capitator next to the pci-e lane. Its finicky and of course i understand if you dont want to change that.

I suggest testing with a guinea pig gpu, just try anything, if it works then you have a gpu issue, if it doesnt then the board is at fault.

 

Lol I'm an idiot sometimes... It worked for 1.5 years, impressive how time runs ^^

It's an Antec with 650watts, bought it together with the 980 after some research and made sure it delivers enough power per lane.

Yes it's also the first time in my 20 years of gamer life and I saw a lot. And afaik I'm not silly because I growed up with pc technique and also working in the IT. Like I said, it works fine for 1.5 years and I didn't changed anything in the rig or moving it or something else... Maybe it's really just to old and let a modern 980 running at full power isn't that good. The mainboard was bought 2012, so it was the first one with pcie 3.0. I don't know...

So when nobody says jump to intel skylake and DDR4 ram it seems to proof my concerns regarding the little performance gain

 

Well you have the options to go all cowboy and replace those caps, ive never done it myself but i watched my former boss do it a while back.

Still i recommend getting a second hand board and generally they are extremely robust, as you have an IT background you likely know that hardware breaks.

the 3770 is still very fantastic and with modern api cpu board things will begin to matter less

 

self replacement of the caps is something I wouldn't try or being confident to be able to do that ^^

Looked at ebay and used boards are around 80 to 120 bucks, a lot of money for something I don't know how it was used and without warranty when a new sockel 1151 board is around 150 bucks. Upgrade would mean no stress for the next few years, but you're right ivy bridge is still a decent powerful cpu especially when there was no need to overclock it, so there is also still some buffer.

 

If the board is in fact getting dodgy and you're unwilling to buy a used replacement to keep things running, upgrading is pretty much your only choice. Hardware problems tend to escalate if ignored rather than go away by themselves.

If you have a decent mobo it's built with aluminum organic polymer caps, typically rated at ~50000 operating hours, which is ~5.7 years of continuous running. They should be OK given the age of your system, although obviously any part can fail at any time in the field. I'm running the same chip as you on an Asus P8Z77-Pro and indeed that's how it's constructed - but to be fair I haven't opened it up to check that particular cap.

Caps are easy to change out, if not for you than for any general electronics technician in your local area. Some modern boards still use through-hole parts for the larger electros which makes it real easy.

 

I wouldn't recommend second hand, I would recommend new investement)

 

You didn't mention anything about 6/8-pin molex external power connectors. Does your card have them? Are you using them? I'm wondering if the card can run... for a while... without them, and if running without them causes too much current draw through the PCI-E connector and ultimately damages it. It's just a stab in the dark but maybe it's one that might save you some money?

 

Have you called the manufacturer?
Sometimes they have left-over stock and in the spirit of good customer relations, will send a replacement.
At this point, it certainly cant hurt.

 

Sure it does, it's the card in my signature. And like I said I played with this hardware for the past 1.5 years without problems (before it was running a GTX670 and before a GTX260 in the overall 4 years I got this mainboard and CPU). And I also can take the 980 into another pcie express slot and it is running without problems. So I can play for example CoH2 at single screen with 60fps, I doubt this would be working if the card doesn't get enough power from the two external power connectors. I could live with it for a time when there wouldn't be the problem that the bandwith of the pcie x4 slot isn't enough to fire AC in triple full hd. And next week is DLC week, so time matters

Thanks to Intel the lifespan is so short and socket 1155 was displaced by socket 1150 in the year 2013 and displaced by socket 1151 in the year 2015 (and next year the next socket will come). So you sit here with a decent powerful CPU and all you can do is buying an used board (and 70% price tag for used hardware compared to new one is kind of wtf) or an overprized new one (when you find one or micro ATX which can't be good for stressing the hardware to its limit). I really hope AMD can find its old strength to get back some competition.




Did anybody upgrade from sandy or ivy to a skylake CPU and DDR4 ram with good experiences regarding AC which would justify the investment a little bit?

 

Last ditch effort.
Take a pencil and cut the eraser so that is is straight and will fit into your pci express slot. Sometimes the contacts get a bit of buildup on them over time, the eraser removes most of that. Also make sure the board is not powered, use a q-tip with a small amount of rubbing alcohol on it and clean it.

The GPU is working, I would still clean the contacts on that as well.

 

If I were you I'd grab a new, reasonably priced motherboard. If you could find a good refurbished model that would be great. It seems you tested everything already. Okay, maybe couple more things:

• Use compressed air on the PCIe port. Maybe it's just dirty and you aren't getting full contact.
• Physically reach to the port and try to clean it with some coffee filter (it won't leave any residue). Use a toothpick and wrap the cloth around it.

Don't try the above if you aren't comfortable touching your motherboard or not sure on how to ground yourself!!​

• Borrow a tester card from a friend/relative and see if you still get the same problem with it.

By the way, not sure what you've read online but 4x PCI slots *are* a bottleneck for high end cards and will indeed reduce the performance substantially, as you already realized. It's only at 8x where the performance hit is minimal and that scales up with SLI configurations.

 

I had a PCI-E slot failure on my "Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H s1155" motherboard last year (it was almost three years old at that point).
I put the graphics card in the other slot but that didn't work either so I assumed it was the GPU that failed and ordered a new GPU .
I ended up spending loads of money on X99 parts and built a new system.

I use the Gigabyte motherboard in a HTPC as the CPU has on-board graphics.

 

Funny, mine is the Gigabyte GA-77-DS3H

Thanks for all advices, I also ended up in ordering new parts which will arrive tomorrow.

 

I see you guys have 900 series cards that aren't as heavy as previous versions but still, these cards are huge and weight quite a bit.
I'm currently using a 780ti, It weights a ton, My case now comes with a GPU support which I find bears quite a lot of the weight from the PCI-e slot.