Will a pci express 3.0 video card work in my pc with pci express x16?

[tasmaniac2k]

I have an HP Blackbird 002-01a PC and would like to install an Nvidia 680 video card because of the 1500 cuda gpus.  Will the new Nvidia card with a pci express 3.0 bus design work in my pc with a pci express x16 bus?

[Big_Dave]

Hi,

You have posed a good question. The answer is that this EVGA 680 is backwards compatible to PCI-E x16 version 2.  The card needs to be backwards compatible to some extent or the market becomes very limited.  The top AMD 7970 card in one magazine review mentioned a 7-10% performance increase when used in a 3.0 slot. 

I noticed that all of the NVIDIA 680s made by multiple manufacturers and offered at Newegg are marked "Out of Stock" as of April 5th.

[tasmaniac2k · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the info.

The way I see the situation is, if I can expect a similar performance speed throttle-back effect for graphics, that shouldn't be a problem.  The main reason I'm looking at the gtx 680 is because of the 1500 cuda GPUs.  I use the Blender 3d graphics program which has the new Cycles render engine that can use the cuda GPUs for faster processing.  My current Nvidia gtx 260 only has 200 GPUs, so the greater number in the 680 should provide a significant increase in render speed.

Thanks again for you help.