PCI X1 not X16

[PLODDITHANLEY]

I have had this before when firing up PR the B&W film stutters and jumps and vastly reduced game performance on my laptop.

To troubleshoot I used GPU z which shows PCI 1.1 X 16 @ 1.1 X1 then you launch a little renderer which strains the GPU enough to force it off any powersaving and onto full power mode, but it stayed at X1.
So a find another card on ebay (Thank god for MSI with easy to change cards) and install it and all back to normal - stuttering and various weird shit gone and game performance back to normal.
A bad footnote to this story is a sent it across the world to be reballed 3-4 months later it was returned exactly the same.

So today when my kid is having a LAN party I fire up the Mrs's PC (Vista32/E8500 @ 3.2/3GB RAM/Sapphire 6870) I notice the PR intro stuttering like hell but game performance wasn't that bad with med settings running about half FPS of my big PC certainly playable, also I did a furmark bench mark and it seemed comparable to other 6870's (2400ish) strange.

When I run GPUz that old X1 again even with furmark running so I reseat the graphics card and we're all good at X16 and decent FPS on max at 1440X900 Furmark is only at 2700.

Wierdness:

1. PR's introvideo indicates more of a problem than the game

2. Furmark @ X1 is 2400 and @ X16 2700 not much change

I know that at high demands x8 is fine but would have thought X1 would be crippling but in each case either on my laptop 9600m GT and desktop 6870 PR was playable just in the case of the laptop but fine on the desktop.

This testsort of supports my findings.

User benchmark to see if its performance is within parameters.