Can the PCI 16x slot be used for a 1x Card?

[Ricky_005]

Can the PCI 16x slot be used for a 1x Card?

 

Im wanting to add a PCI e 1X TV card to my board but I dont want to use my 1x slot next to my video card which would run my temp up on my video card.

 

Seem like I heard that you could use 1x in the 16x slot.

 

Can someone confirm?

[killingdjef]

Havent tried it but should work though

[Guest Kane]

I believe the answer is "yes". Not only that, you should even be able to do the opposite. For example, you plug a PCI-E X8 device into a PCI-E X4 slot, it should still work, albeit with reduced bandwidth. That's why PCI-E is called scalable.

[red930]

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say no. While obviously the speeds are adequate I'm guessing that the connections in the slot aren't designed as such.

 

A google search might return a bunch more information than here, i've never seen anyone post about it before.

 

I believe the answer is "yes". Not only that, you should even be able to do the opposite. For example, you plug a PCI-E X8 device into a PCI-E X4 slot, it should still work, albeit with reduced bandwidth. That's why PCI-E is called scalable.

 

I think its called scalable because it can run at different speeds, but not support different slot sizes. For example video cards are called x16 because they require a slot that can handle the size, not the bandwidth as obviously they run just fine in x8 mode in an x16 slot. If an x8 device is physically the same size as an x4 device then it wold probably work.

[B4L1STA]

Yes, it should. Read up on the wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI-Express

A PCIe card will physically fit (and work correctly) in any slot that is at least as large as it is (e.g. an x1 card will work in an x4 or x16 slot), and a slot of a large physical size (e.g. x16)

That was one one of the design aspects of PCI-Express - backwards compatibility.

[Squid1]

Any PCIe slot is required to server x1 cards.

 

If you plug a x4 card into a x16 slot then it will work, although the spec only says that x1 must be supported. x4 might.

[ramik]

I remember reading an article on Toms Hardware Guide where the guys there put some tape on the PCIe pins of a 16x pci grafic card to make it use 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x PCIe bus and doing a benchmark on each configuration, it was a nice article but i cannot find the url right now.... but it is out there