New GTX 970 running on PCI-E 1.1 x16 instead of 2.0

Question

I recently purchased a GTX 970 for my system and all seemed to be fine, drivers install perfectly, games run OK if not a little under what I would have expected (this is probably due to my CPU not being up to par for those games but still) until I checked my GPU-Z reading and noticed my card is always running at PCI-E 1.1 x16 instead of 2.0 as my motherboard allows:

My motherboard: Asus M4N68T-M V2

No idea what could be causing this aside from improper placement of the GPU in the PCIe slot, tried that once already, could be worth another try but I'd like some feedback from you lovely people first.

Solution

It doesn't look like the motherboard's chipset supports PCIe 2.0 - for example, the Wikipedia entry for the nForce 630a states 20 lanes of PCIe 1.1.

Edit More information: running at PCIe 1.1 x16 is probably not something to worry about, Guru3D just did an article on it: PCI Express Scaling Game Performance Analysis review which concludes "if you use a single high-end graphics card then really, even the PCIe Gen 1.1 slot would be sufficient. Gen 2.0 is preferred and Gen 3.0 only brings in a marginal improvement."

Comments

[Admin]

did you notice the question mark next to the Bus interface setting? does it show PCI-E 1.1 even when the GPU is on full load?

[Mike R]

Yes, also tested it under game load. Same results.

[Mike R]

Ah that's it thank you. You see I was mislead by two things, I thought my chipset supported 2.0 because it said so on some website which I sadly can't find right now, and the fact I was convinced my old GPU ran at 2.0, in the mean time I tested it and it runs at 1.1 as well. Thank you.

[bertieb]

This contradicts the accepted answer, which states that the chipset doesn't support greater than 1.1, rather than it being a Windows issue.