PCI Expression

I mentioned before that my PC is problematic. Well, that was all behind now. Turns out, it was never Windows 7's or Nvidia's fault. It was in fact Gigabyte's. All along, I was affected by PCI Express x1 Bug. This bug, as it happens, makes the system reports the PCI Express express slot as x1 instead of the full x16. When this happens, the graphics card will not function up to its intended speed. For comparison, in my case, my 3D Mark Vantage score was 4416. But when I managed to fix it, the score went to a staggering 9690. So what does this means in real world? For one, there's no more stuttering of audio in Windows 7, especially in full screen Youtube. Most importantly, I'm now able to play all my games at the maximum settings! w00t indeed!

Now I am to apologize to Windows 7 and Nvidia for all the curses I gave them all those times (yeah Microsoft have had enough curses from me throughout all the Windows iterations).

So what happened? Somehow I decided to download GPU-Z and check my system, and from there did I see the Bus Interface as PCI-E x16 @ x1. Further digging brought me to an article at Tech ARP, but unfortunately none of the solutions fix the problem. Much digging later brought me wading through forums, and I decided to follow a few suggestions to reseat the card and all. I'm not entirely sure what happened, but these were in my last ditch effort:

• Uninstalled and cleaned the system from any remnants of Nvidia drivers (using Driver Sweeper)
• Reinstalled a beta driver that I was sure was giving me performance (195.39)
• Reseated the GTX260
• Reset the BIOS config to fail-safe default
  

For the record, my motherboard is Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3. I was sure I was going to kiss it goodbye, but well, I guess I can get to keep my money after all.

Now, even the nvlddmkm.sys-induced BSOD was gone. I can safely say that my system is fault-free! I just hope that the problem will stay fixed, lest that Core i5-Nvidia Fermi-6GB DDR3 system I was dreaming about would seem inevitable...