Motherboard Chipset PCIe lanes controlled by on a thin mini-ITX board : performance hit ?

[aquelito]

Hi there,

I found a custom version with a full PCIe 16X slot of this DFI SD101-Q170 thin mini-ITX board :


According to the motherboard doc, the PCIe lanes are controlled by the chipset :

Is this going to be a huge performance hit ?

Is there a risk that the physical 16X PCIe slot on the custom version of this board may be wired as 4X ?

Thanks !

 

[AMv8-1day]

I would assume that it is PCIe x16 in formfactor alone. Allowing for greater card compatibility while still dumbing everything down to x4.
Some of the newer thin-H310/Q370 boards seem to come with x16 physical slots as well, although I haven't found clear wording yet on whether or not they're electrically limited to x4. Here's hoping though!
Check out ASRock's IMD-1212 & 1213 boards.

 

[aquelito]

Thanks !

I've just asked Asrock and DFI directly to confirm whether it's "true" x16 or not.

On the particular board I showed, the PCIe slot is "managed" by the chipset, not by the CPU.
Any performance drop to be expected ?

 

[jtd871]

Might be a bit of a hit, but it shouldn't be huge and SFF beggars can't be choosers.