YouTuber der8auer claims that NVIDIA RTX 5080 FE with PCIe 5.0 x16 is unstable. Preliminarily, it is believed to be caused by the layout of the video card from three separate boards.
Video card RTX 5080 FE, overview by der8auer demonstrated boot errors and unexpected crashes when operating in PCIe Gen 5.0 mode. While investigating a similar problem, Igor’s Lab came to a preliminary conclusion that the cause could be the layout of the video card, which consists of separate boards connected by cables. The problems are similar to those that have RTX 50 cards with riser cards — they are also eliminated by enabling PCIe 4 mode in the motherboard settings.
The YouTuber had a test bench with an Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Hero board and an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor. The bench was also used to compare the RTX 5080 with the RX 7900 XTX, RTX 4080, RTX 4090, and even the RTX 5090, with which he had no problems. Initially, the RTX 5080 FE did not emit any signal, and it started working only after several connection attempts. The latest drivers didn’t help — after the next reboot, the system couldn’t find the video card.
After many attempts, the video card was able to run at an extremely low PCIe x8 Gen 1.1 speed. Further tweaks and many restarts allowed the RTX 5080 FE to run at PCIe 5.0, with crashes and freezes in Valorant, PUBG, and Remnant 2. Only switching to PCIe 4.0 completely eliminated the problem.
Igor’s Lab in its review RTX 5090 notes that signal stability is critical for Blackwell’s PCIe 5.0 graphics cards. The researchers noted the following problems with PCIe connectivity: inability to initialize the video card, unexpected crashes and freezes — the same symptoms that der8auer experienced. Previously, reviewers have already noted problems with using riders with new NVIDIA graphics cards, which also disappeared with the transition to PCIe 4.0. Igor’s Lab assumes that these problems are similar, and consist of less reliable cable connection between the cards in PCIe 5.0 mode. This is a preliminary assumption, the problem requires further study.
Source: Tom’s Hardware
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