GPU fan airflow question / stacked PCI cards

[thinkmad99]

Hey all,

Just upgraded my GPU to a GTX 980ti in my 5,1 MP. I'm a video editor so it'll be doing regular work and probably getting quite hot.

I then realized my eSata card was in a 4x PCI lane and wanted to move it down to a 16x lane, but just seeing this made me a bit sad & worried. Mostly worried.

I know the 980 has 2 intake fans but this is really just sitting on top of one of them... is that an issue?

(also maybe someone can advise - I realized my old Sonnet eSata card was limited to eSata 3.0gb/s... should I upgrade that for 6.0gb/s if I'm editing video? Like, I could get better speeds off an SSD... but for a disk HD is it going to give me any speed improvements?)

Thanks!
Alex

 

[William_si]

why do want the card in 2?

3 and 4 share 4 lanes via a PLX chip so this makes generally sense, but without this knowledge both slots seem as x4 to the user - like your card is...

6Gbit will not give any advantage on HDDs, the USB 3.0 route is also often cheaper then than eSATA if you have no port multipliers, but reusing HW maybe makes sense.

If you have port multipliers supporting 6Gbit on the upstream and you have 4+ HDDs on this now with 3Gbit it would make sense also.

 

[thinkmad99]

Ah ok - yeah honestly I'm not to knowledgable on how the PCI lanes would affect data read/write speeds.

Maybe I forgot to mention that my SSD is external, running in via eSata. Right now that's 3Gbit, which I guess is just fine!

Thanks

 

[William_si]

For an SSD you should be able to get another 150-200MB/s more on a 6G card though the price (70-100$?) probably does not justify anything over a nice 4 port dedicated USB 3 card (same price) and case.