OT: new Gigabyte motherboard weirdness

[Giles Orr]

Newegg is advertising a special on the new Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3P
motherboard.  I thought it looked nice, but wanted to read up on the
specs.  Over at Gigabyte's site [1] I find out:

"When set Turbo SATA3 / USB3.0 (Marvell 9128 /NEC USB 3.0 Controller)
to enable in BIOS setup, 1st PCIex16 slot will run at x8 bandwidth and
2nd PCIex16 slot will be disabled."

Why would you put a second PCI-e slot on the board if you're going to
disable it when the user actually tries to _use_ other features?  The
people who are likely to use both PCI-e slots are also the early
adopters who are going to use SATA3 or USB3.  This strikes me as a
poor design and a hell of a way to alienate people who didn't read
their specs carefully enough.  I thought Gigabyte was better than
this?

The 2nd PCIex16 slot was never actually x16: it runs at x4 at the best
of times, so I guess the "x16" part only indicates the physical size
of the slot.  As a non-gamer who runs Linux and wants multiple heads,
was I likely to notice that my nvidia card in that slot was
bandwidth-choked?  (I'm curious about the answer to this question
without regard to the motherboard.)


[1] http://www.gigabyte-usa.com/Products/Motherboard/Products_Spec.aspx?ClassValue=Motherboard&ProductID=3253&ProductName=GA-P55A-UD3P

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
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