Advanced Dock PCI-E Slot

[wev162]

The Lenovo promo materials claim that the Dock's slot supports graphic cards while other sources online state that while the dock's slot is a full sized x16 slot, only one lane is physically routed to the card which functionally makes it a x1 slot. Does the slot actually have enough lanes to support a "normal" graphics card that is more suited to gaming than the anemic solutions the T60 ships with or is Lenovo referring to a hypothetical x1 card which wouldn't be useful for anything but 2D graphics? Thanks!

[lithium726]

well, RonS put a 7800GTX in the advanced dock and noticed no performance decrease, so id say its a full x16 slot... or at least an x8 slot..

[RonS]

Confirmed. It's an x16 slot.

[Ponch]

Confirmed. It's an x16 slot.

Really? I have a pic which shows that the connection to the internal electronics of the dock is very smal and looks more like a 1x PCIe connection.
Can you share photos with a 7800GTX installed? How does it fit? It looks like the slot ist too small to put such a long card in there. And how do you power the 7800GTX? Do you have an external power supply?

[wev162]

Aren't most PCI-E graphics cards backwards compatible with fewer than a full x16 lane slot, only performance decreases accordingly? The reason I wonder is because the Advanced Dock compatibility document on levovo's site has the following to say about the slot:

The PCI Express slot on the ThinkPad Advanced Dock accommodates cards
which meet the following specifications:
o Card dimension:
- Full height & half length or Low Profile PCI Express card (*1)
- Card dimension must comply with PCI Express specification 1.0a
o PCI Express slot connector:
- x1, x4 or x8 or x16 card edge connector
o Other requirements: Work with x1 lane and Power consumption is lower than 50W
NOTE: *1 Full height bracket is required for Low Profile card

ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/pc/pccbbs/op ... bility.pdf

Thoughts anyone?

[RonS]

Please see this thread:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=22358

[Ponch]

Look at the picture and you can clearly see that the PCIe port is connected with just 1 Lane(It looks like) to the dock.

@RonS

Have you made benchmarks of your 7800GTX Card and can you post the results?

How fast is 1 PCIe Lane compared to the old AGB 8x standard?



edit: I have found some numbers: PCIe 1x = 500MB/s
AGP 8x = 2,128MB/s
So the graphic card at 1 PCIe Lane have to be a lot slower than in a normal desktop 16x board.
Can you confirm this RonS?

[zyphria]

Whoah, how much is does that docking station cost? I'm suddenly having this crazy idea in my head of having a solid work machine & gaming rig...