Have you got an ASUS P5E3 Deluxe motherboard? Does the graphics card slot resort to 8x PCIe on return from standby mode requiring a reboot to get back to 16x? If so then read on and fix it easily…

The Problem
I first noticed this problem when I started overclocking my Gigabyte 4850 graphics card. Normally when running the graphics card utility GPU-Z, the bus bandwidth of the PCIe slot would be reported as 16x which is correct. However sometimes I found that it would drop down to 8x. After a while it became apparent that this was happening when the PC was returning from S3 standby mode. Running at only 8x will theoretically lead to a drop in performance although I didn’t measure it so I can’t say by how much but I also noticed that as part of this bug that I saw a drop in the maximum stable overclock.

If you physically move the graphics card down to the other 16x PCIe slot on the motherboard things actually get worse. It will run at 16x normally but will wake up at 2x.

This problem occurs whether the graphics card is overclocked or not and on all versions of the ATI catalyst driver. The reason that the graphics driver update makes no difference is because this is a motherboard related problem.

You can check to see if you have this problem by downloading and running the graphics card monitoring and information tool, GPU-Z. This software tool is available at this link – GPU-Z. One advantage of this tool is that it doesn’t need installing, just run the file that you download and you can even run/keep it on a USB memory stick.

The Solution
Well the solution is a simple motherboard BIOS update. I updated to the latest version of the ASUS P5E3 Deluxe BIOS which was version 1409. There is now a later release, 1407, which I assume but cannot guarantee has the same fix in it. And, no I don’t understand the ASUS BIOS numbering either!

Updating the BIOS on this board is very simple, the way I did it was to use the ASUS EZ Flash utility in the BIOS. All you need to do is 1. save the newly downloaded BIOS to a USB memory stick, 2. reset your BIOS settings back to default (remember any custom settings for re-entering later), 3. reboot your PC and enter the BIOS (press ‘Del’ at startup), 4. choose EZ Flash from the Tools menu and follow the simple instructions. I would also recommend using EZ Flash to save a copy of you existing BIOS to the USB memory stick before updating, for recovery purposes just in case of a failure.

Just as a footnote, the BIOS version that I was running when I saw this problem was 1001 and I cannot confirm or deny whether this problem is specific to that BIOS version or to all versions prior to a certain one etc. I can however confirm that version 1409 has allowed me to overclock my E2160 CPU to the same frequency as I did on 1001. In other words I have not yet noticed any downside to upgrading.

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