A player is surprised to find out after 5 years that he has installed his AMD graphics card incorrectly in his computer. For years, he had struggled with frame drops and other issues but couldn’t explain the problems.
A player reports on Reddit that he has been dealing with gaming issues for years: games do not run smoothly, he has consistently faced severe frame drops and stutters. He has a fast graphics card, the RX 5700 XT, which should handle most games effortlessly even in 2025.
However, after 5 years, he has now noticed that he installed his graphics card incorrectly in his computer. He discovered the mistake after installing a new Wi-Fi card.
The graphics card is in the wrong slot on the motherboard
What exactly is the problem? The user explained that he installed a new Wi-Fi card in his computer and then felt that he had even less performance than before. It was then that he realized the graphics card was plugged into the wrong PCIe slot.
Why does the slot play an important role? Graphics cards are typically installed in the first long x16 slot on the motherboard, as this provides the highest bandwidth for data and usually offers the fastest and most direct connection to the CPU. Additionally, motherboards often have other PCIe slots available, such as x1, x2, x4, and x8, which are often reserved for extension cards like Wi-Fi or sound. The more lanes a slot offers, the higher the bandwidth.
However, many motherboards have multiple large x16 slots, and the second large slot is usually slower or becomes slower when the first slot is occupied: instead of the full 16 lanes, only 4 lanes are available for connected devices.
Additionally, the second slot is not connected to the CPU but to the chipset, making it inherently slower. Furthermore, your graphics card has to share the connection with other components that also communicate with the chipset.
The user explained that switching the slot was definitely worth it. Not only were all the problems gone, but the performance was also significantly better (via Reddit.com):
The performance difference is like night and day. Even with simple games like Rocket League, there were issues. And now I can play games like Cyberpunk on high quality at 70 FPS. Before, it was also 70 FPS, but you could just tell it wasn’t running smoothly because there were stutters and frame drops.
Another player bought a new graphics card for his gaming PC and tried to trick his wife about it. But she saw through his lies by asking an artificial intelligence for help. Perhaps the player shouldn’t have lied to his wife: A player tells his wife that he bought an RTX 5090 cheaply – his wife doesn’t believe him, asks ChatGPT and exposes him
