Can someone explain to me what it means for dual PCIe x16 slots to have one at x16 and another at x4 (or x8, or whatever)? What exactly does this affect? Is it much worse than having them run both at x16? Is the X38 chipset the only one that supports both at x16? Thanks.
U're questions is good, but I'm a lot of dont understand What u're mean? Second slot it's for sli mode. Speed of both slots have to be identical. Speed x16 this a standard for PCI-Express. AGP is older and speed there 8x... x16 or x32 dont influences at the speed of your system.
PCIe is a serial connection. Instead of 80 wires in a parallel configuration like with the old ATA66 cables, serial uses two wires one to send and one to receive data, hence the thinner wires for SATA. This is a Lane. When talking about PCIe the numbers (eg. x16) refer to the number of Lanes so x4 means four lanes for data transfer. More lanes mean more data can be sent per second so PCIe x16 can send more data per second than PCIe x4. This is purely down the hardware so a x4 PCIe slot cannot run at x16. No. Nvidia's 680i is another example of a chipset that'll supports two x16 slots
