3DMark05 and Serious Magic bandwidth testing
3DMark05 and Serious Magic
We ran 3DMark05's default test to detail the effect of running the HIS X1300 x1 card in either the x16 or x1 PCIe slots. When run in a x1 slot integrated graphics are still active and take away some of the performance by, presumably, stealing bandwidth available to the card.
We also ran the discrete Radeon X1300 Pro with the usual x16 PCIe setting in BIOS. However, by forcing the BIOS to limit the x16 electrical slot's bandwidth to x1 PCIe we see a ~10% drop in performance, down from 2,828 marks to 2,524, suggesting that it becomes bandwidth starved to some degree.
Thinking again of bandwidth implications of x1 and x16 PCIe, we ran Serious Magic's bandwidth-evaluation program that details GPU-to-host speeds. What we see is the physical manifestation of equipping a discrete video card with a x1 PCIe interface. A discrete x16 PCI Radeon X1300 Pro has almost 6x the data-transfer speed, suggesting that HyperMemory and a x1 interface don't fit well together.
