Mobo with 6 x PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots.

I am looking for an Intel ATX motherboard with an LGA1150 socket and has at least 5 but preferably 6 PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots and supports SLI in the $200 price range.

Although it isn't too important, I prefer a motherboard that comes in a blue color scheme.

I do NOT want an ASUS motherboard, there are too many reports of their motherboards being faulty or DOA and it seems they have horrible customer service and are known to drag out RMA claims for months.

I will NOT be overclocking and don't need all of the fancy features the more expensive boards have.

I found only one board that matches what I want but it was an ASUS board and was almost $400.

You aren't going to find one without the PLX PEX multiplexer chip. That multiplexer chip greatly increases the cost of the motherboard. You are better off finding an X79 or X99 motherboard.

not happening

Why do you want that many lanes just out of curiosity? All of the current nVidia cards only supports up to 4-way SLI, unless you are doing Tesla?

Also I have only ever heard of 1150 mobos multiplexing to 32 lanes, never heard of one higher than that, even top of the line X99 with CPU only has 40 lanes, and those boards, by their very nature, does not have boards with Multiplex chips.

You will most likely be looking at very specialised boards, possibly dual CPU?

chenw said:

Why do you want that many lanes just out of curiosity? All of the current nVidia cards only supports up to 4-way SLI, unless you are doing Tesla?

Also I have only ever heard of 1150 mobos multiplexing to 32 lanes, never heard of one higher than that, even top of the line X99 with CPU only has 40 lanes, and those boards, by their very nature, does not have boards with Multiplex chips.

You will most likely be looking at very specialised boards, possibly dual CPU?

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ASRock put out a monster with multiplexers. The ASRock X79 Extreme11 came with 2 multiplexers to convert 32 lanes to 64. With the other 8 lanes feeding an onboard LSI chip. I heard it was fairly buggy though, my cousin had one and complained that it was continuously problematic. Of course, it was also expensive as hell.

Outside of that one board, I don't know of any other modern Intel enthusiast board with multiplexer chips.

chenw said:

Why do you want that many lanes just out of curiosity? All of the current nVidia cards only supports up to 4-way SLI, unless you are doing Tesla?

Also I have only ever heard of 1150 mobos multiplexing to 32 lanes, never heard of one higher than that, even top of the line X99 with CPU only has 40 lanes, and those boards, by their very nature, does not have boards with Multiplex chips.

You will most likely be looking at very specialised boards, possibly dual CPU?

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Well I am still learning about this stuff so forgive my ignorance.

I don't know what you mean by Tesla?

I guess I don't fully understand PCI lanes and why some PCI slots are so small and others longer.

I am building a gaming rig and starting with one GTX 970 and will want to add more GTX 970 cards as time goes on. I am going to be getting a Creative Sound Blaster card eventually and may want to add a PCI SSD or raid card. The point is that I don't want to go to add hardware to my new system only to find out that the PCI slot isn't long enough for whatever I am trying to install. I don't understand why all PCI slots aren't full sized.

I understand I may have to spend more for the board I want.

The long slots are *usually* PCI-E slots whose lanes are directly controlled by the CPU itself (IE NorthBridge), while the short PCI-E slots or the legacy PCI slots are 'usually' controlled by the chipset itself (aka SouthBridge).

For most cases, the PCI cards that actively requires a X16 slot are generally GPU's and NVMe SSD's (SSD's that require PCI-E x4 lane). Other than that most of the cards uses only the short X1 slot.

You can easily see what kind of slot a card requires by simply looking at the length of the PCI-E pins. Sound cards, Wifi cards USB PCI-E cards amongst others have generally short PCI-E connectors that will fit into every PCI-E slot (X1 or X16 length). Some PCI-E slots are small because they are generally designed for such cards.

Tesla is an nVidia line of PCI-E cards that's used for computing purposes, those are the only cards I am aware of that can be linked together in greater than 4.

If you are serious about going for SLI, I'd seriously recommend X99 platform. The number of lanes on Z97 is too limited that you may or may not be able to add cards without destroying your ability to SLI. 970 can only go up to 3x SLI, so with a 5820k, you can have a x8/x8/x8 setup with 4 lanes left over for say NVMe SSD. I have not tried A mobo with multiplex chip, but from what I have heard, it does not work as well as real lanes.

However, I do heavily recommend:

1. Not do more than dual SLI, third card and especially 4th card usually does not scale nearly as well as the other two. Even if you want to go tri-sli, 970 is not an idea condidate, you'd want at least 980, or ideally 980ti.
2. Do not get 970's with backplates, they may hinder your ability to install cards directly above GPUs with back plates (EG my PCE-AC68u wifi card cannot be installed before a GPU that has a backplate due to its own heatsink).

As said, two cards, at most. Also, adding cards does not give linear gains. The more cards you add, the less each card gives. Also, adding cards later on rarely pan out with most people. Most of the time, it's simply better to sell the current card and upgrade to the current gen rather than adding cards to the old gen. Choose a number of GPUs, and stick with that number of GPUs as you upgrade. Really, the only time adding on cards as time goes on is if you're getting the top GPU, and don't yet have the money to get another top GPU. Even so, the timespan between purchases should be no more than a few months.

Multiplexer motherboards work by switching lanes around as cards demand them. The total number of lanes to the CPU is still the same, no matter what. If there happens to be a scenario where the GPUs demand 20 lanes worth of bandwidth, it will be restricted to the 16 of the mainstream Intel CPUs.

My suggestion: start in the general hardware subforum, here: http://hardforum.com/forumdisplay.php?f=40 Read the sticky, answering the questions asked in the sticky. The people there will give you good advice.

Chellexelle said:

Well I am still learning about this stuff so forgive my ignorance. I don't know what you mean by Tesla? I guess I don't fully understand PCI lanes and why some PCI slots are so small and others longer. I am building a gaming rig and starting with one GTX 970 and will want to add more GTX 970 cards as time goes on. I am going to be getting a Creative Sound Blaster card eventually and may want to add a PCI SSD or raid card. The point is that I don't want to go to add hardware to my new system only to find out that the PCI slot isn't long enough for whatever I am trying to install. I don't understand why all PCI slots aren't full sized. I understand I may have to spend more for the board I want.

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You should learn more before coming here and shooting from the hip "wanna get mobo with 6 PCIex16 slots". For example: Graphics card takes space of two slots, so even if there are two neighbouring PCIex16 slots you can use one of them only. Thus equally well you can select mobo which has one PCIe x16 and PCIe x4 slot neighbouring to it.

chenw said:

1. Not do more than dual SLI, third card and especially 4th card usually does not scale nearly as well as the other two. Even if you want to go tri-sli, 970 is not an idea condidate, you'd want at least 980, or ideally 980ti.
2. Do not get 970's with backplates, they may hinder your ability to install cards directly above GPUs with back plates (EG my PCE-AC68u wifi card cannot be installed before a GPU that has a backplate due to its own heatsink).

Click to expand...

Tsumi said:

As said, two cards, at most. Also, adding cards does not give linear gains. The more cards you add, the less each card gives. Also, adding cards later on rarely pan out with most people. Most of the time, it's simply better to sell the current card and upgrade to the current gen rather than adding cards to the old gen. Choose a number of GPUs, and stick with that number of GPUs as you upgrade. Really, the only time adding on cards as time goes on is if you're getting the top GPU, and don't yet have the money to get another top GPU. Even so, the timespan between purchases should be no more than a few months..

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Advice for SLI with at most two cards is very reasonable at the present state of the things in which gaming is run by DirectX 11 programming interface. In a couple of months there is coming new DirectX 12 which will provide linear gains. All new games coming in the future will have the DX12 support.

The idea of adding cards in the future is not good especially if the talk is about mid-level cards like GTX970. It is always better to have one card of higher performance than two cards since there are technical issues like microstuttering and weak support for SLI in some games.

DX12 gains can or cannot be linear depending on how much work developers put into multi-GPU support. In most cases it still won't be linear. It might get close, but it's very difficult to get linear gains.

Additionally, there is more than one method of measuring multi-GPU gains. Alternate frame rendering (current preferred multi-GPU method) gives up to double (in two card cases) average and maximum FPS, but minimum FPS is often the same or even lower than single card. Frame time variance is much higher, and you have frame pacing as well as latency issues. Split frame rendering (used in Civilization: Beyond Earth with Mantle) gives lower average and maximum FPS than AFR, but has a much higher minimum, lower frame time variance, less latency, and no frame pacing issues.

Additionally, saying all games will have DX12 after 10's release is overly optimistic. I'm 90% certain we will see a mix of DX11 and DX12 games in both short term and long term, though that does depend on a lot of factors.

Heheh, just when stupid articles keep getting published about PC going downhill... we get a new recruit.
]

PCIe connectors are made up pf PCIe lanes, from 1x all the way up to 16x. More lanes means more bandwidth to allow for faster file transfers, or fancier graphics to be streamed, etc.



The reason why there are a limited number of LARGE PCIe x16 connectors is because:

1. Your processor and support chipset have a limited number of pins on them, so you can only supply so many PCIe lanes. Anticipating the optimal use of those limited lanes means some slots will have 1 lane, and some slots will have more lanes, and some slots will SHARE lanes.

2. Each PCIe slot size has an increasing power it can supply, with the idea being: more bandwidth requires more power. It would be expensive for the motherboard to have to supply way more power than you would likely need, so the number of x16 slots is limited. The power levels are:

x1 = 10w to 25 watts
x2, 4x, 8x = 25 watts
x16 = 75 watts

3. There's limited motherboard space for everything that need to go there, so longer slots that you don't use are a waste.

Since the average use case is 1 video card or less, you see very few boards with more than 3 x16 slots.

Since the majority of expansion cards only require a x1 slot, and you can fit smaller cards into larger slots, that means most motherboards simplify by just having x1 and x16 slots.

OP, I'll reiterate what others have said that you really don't want to go past two card SLI. You'd be better off selling your one GTX 970 and upgrading to a 980ti or Pascal if it's out then (10xx series cards or whatever it's called.) Many people sold their dual 980s to get a single Titan X just to get away from multi-card issues (no support, bugs, ect. that single cards don't have to deal with).

Here's some data: http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphi...3-Way-and-4-Way-SLI-Performance/Battlefield-4

I went two card SLI and not more not because of $$$ but three cards or more can actually degrade performance when you look at frame times.

It sounds like you have good intentions trying to "future proof" but it doesn't usually work well in the PC industry. SLI generally only makes sense if you're using the top of the line cards for SLI. Mid range it's better off to just sell your card and upgrade when the next series hits. It might make sense to get a 970 now then when Pascal hits with full DX12 support to upgrade then.

Tsumi said:

DX12 gains can or cannot be linear depending on how much work developers put into multi-GPU support. In most cases it still won't be linear. It might get close, but it's very difficult to get linear gains.

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Not exactly so. There will be sea change from the current DX 11 in which it is not possible to get linear gain and DX 12 in which it is natural and done basically with just few steps.

Tsumi said:

Additionally, there is more than one method of measuring multi-GPU gains. Alternate frame rendering (current preferred multi-GPU method) gives up to double (in two card cases) average and maximum FPS, but minimum FPS is often the same or even lower than single card. Frame time variance is much higher, and you have frame pacing as well as latency issues. Split frame rendering (used in Civilization: Beyond Earth with Mantle) gives lower average and maximum FPS than AFR, but has a much higher minimum, lower frame time variance, less latency, and no frame pacing issues.
Additionally, saying all games will have DX12 after 10's release is overly optimistic. I'm 90% certain we will see a mix of DX11 and DX12 games in both short term and long term, though that does depend on a lot of factors.

Click to expand...

Market will rather quickly enforce DX 12 in all new games since it is real performance booster. What you say about AFR and ASR pales comparing to the fact that essential bottleneck is in handling data flows by the CPU by essentially single core in single thread. This is why multiGPU systems are getting huge performance hits. in DX 12 this is completely changed, multiple cores operate in multiple threads and this botleneck is eliminated. For example 4-way SLI will be very naturally matched with 4-core CPU. The question is only if 8-core CPU will provide additional gain and by how much.

Dayaks said:

OP, I'll reiterate what others have said that you really don't want to go past two card SLI. You'd be better off selling your one GTX 970 and upgrading to a 980ti or Pascal if it's out then (10xx series cards or whatever it's called.) Many people sold their dual 980s to get a single Titan X just to get away from multi-card issues (no support, bugs, ect. that single cards don't have to deal with).
Here's some data: http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphi...3-Way-and-4-Way-SLI-Performance/Battlefield-4 I went two card SLI and not more not because of $$$ but three cards or more can actually degrade performance when you look at frame times. It sounds like you have good intentions trying to "future proof" but it doesn't usually work well in the PC industry. SLI generally only makes sense if you're using the top of the line cards for SLI. Mid range it's better off to just sell your card and upgrade when the next series hits. It might make sense to get a 970 now then when Pascal hits with full DX12 support to upgrade then.

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Full agreement here, if rumors that 980Ti is coming very soon are true it will be much better buy than two GTX 970. Pascal is melody of the future, it is 2016 but not January 1st and life is to short too wait for it especially if delays to December (delays are often with next generation of chips). Overall, optimal strategy is buying single best card you can afford. Then if you reach the current Mt. Everest of the cards you can think about buying two of them for the SLI. This is how I ended with 2xTiX but I am absolved in part that crazy amount of money spent is not only for gaming but some professional apps .

wirk said:

Not exactly so. There will be sea change from the current DX 11 in which it is not possible to get linear gain and DX 12 in which it is natural and done basically with just few steps.


Market will rather quickly enforce DX 12 in all new games since it is real performance booster. What you say about AFR and ASR pales comparing to the fact that essential bottleneck is in handling data flows by the CPU by essentially single core in single thread. This is why multiGPU systems are getting huge performance hits. in DX 12 this is completely changed, multiple cores operate in multiple threads and this botleneck is eliminated. For example 4-way SLI will be very naturally matched with 4-core CPU. The question is only if 8-core CPU will provide additional gain and by how much.

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Source or I'll say BS claims. DX12 by nature is a hands-off API, letting developers do whatever they want with minimal framework. DX11 provides more framework, and doing things inside that framework will be easier than doing the same in DX12. If game engines end up making DX12 as easy or easier to program for, what you say can happen. If they don't, it won't.

AFR has to predict the next frame. 3 cards, it needs to predict 2 frames ahead. 4, 3 frames ahead. That is what leads to latency and frame time variance, especially when the prediction is wrong. SFR has no frame prediction. It has little to do with data flows or CPU performance. AFR allows spitting out the frames as fast as possible, while SFR forces the rest of the GPUs to wait for the slowest one, hence the lower average and maximum FPS.