ISO Z270 MoBo with a chipset 8 lane PCIe slot for NIC

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piperfect

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Are there any Z270 motherboards that would allow me to use a video card at x16 while having an x8 PCIe 2.0 network card installed such as an X520-DA2? ........without some sort of stuttering PLX chip like multiplexer.

I can't seem to find a Z270 motherboard that has useful PCIe port expand-ability.
 
Simple answer is no. There isn't enough lanes in the chipset. There's only 24 lanes from the cpu to work with 16 go to the slots the other 8 are used by the onboard controllers. Depending on what you are using the computer for you may not notice a difference between running the gpu on only 8 lanes and even in gaming currently the difference is minimal.
 
mathot said:
You'd have to do video card at x8 and NIC at x4
Click to expand...

No, you could run the video card at 8x and the network card at 8x. That's a pure split configuration allowed on z-series chipsets, and many cheaper motherboards feature that.

It's also the ONLY configuration allowed to run SLI on z-series motherboards without paying for a PLX chipset, so you can bet your ass it's pretty common.

Like this one, for example. Shared 8x8 SLI slots, and a third slot running at 4x sourced through the z270 chipset. I wouldn't use the x4 slot and populate the m.2 port at the same time though, since they're using the same shared DMI x4 bandwidth..

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128971

The video card performance will not be limited by 8x PCIe 3.0. See here:

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_1080_PCI_Express_Scaling/24.html

Also,. you people need to stop spreading lies about z270. The TOTAL NUMBER of PCIe 3 lanes available from the CPU is STILL TWENTY, not 24. Four are reserved for the DMI bus to the chipset, and the 16 left go to other cards, just like ALL recent mainstream platform from Intel.

Intel just added four more lanes that devices can be connected to on the z270 chipset itself. It's still only fed by 4x DMI 3.0, just like Skylake's z170. You'll just end-up with more feature-filled motherboards that don't have enough bandwidth for all the devices, just like we had with Haswell.

Don't blame me for this bullshit, it's Intel's marketing people hard-at-work trying to get you to buy a pointless new chipset. So they attach 4 more lanes for another m.2 card that you can't possibly feed. :eek:

If you plan on using the bandwidth of that dual-port 10G Ethernet card, and want to connect some fast m.2 I/O, you're going to run into bandwidth problems beyond a single m.2. You might want to consider x99 instead?
 
Last edited:
whateverer said:
No, you could run the video card at 8x and the network card at 8x. That's a pure split configuration allowed on z-series chipsets, and many cheaper motherboards feature that.

It's also the ONLY configuration allowed to run SLI on z-series motherboards without paying for a PLX chipset, so you can bet your ass it's pretty common.

Like this one, for example. Shared 8x8 SLI slots, and a third slot running at 4x sourced through the z270 chipset. I wouldn't use the x4 slot and populate the m.2 port at the same time though, since they're using the same shared DMI x4 bandwidth..

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128971

The video card performance will not be limited by 8x PCIe 3.0. See here:

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_1080_PCI_Express_Scaling/24.html

Also,. you people need to stop spreading lies about z270. The TOTAL NUMBER of PCIe 3 lanes available from the CPU is STILL TWENTY, not 24. Four are reserved for the DMI bus to the chipset, and the 16 left go to other cards, just like ALL recent mainstream platform from Intel.

Intel just added four more lanes that devices can be connected to on the z270 chipset itself. It's still only fed by 4x DMI 3.0, just like Skylake's z170. You'll just end-up with more feature-filled motherboards that don't have enough bandwidth for all the devices, just like we had with Haswell.

Don't blame me for this bullshit, it's Intel's marketing people hard-at-work trying to get you to buy a pointless new chipset. So they attach 4 more lanes for another m.2 card that you can't possibly feed. :eek:

If you plan on using the bandwidth of that dual-port 10G Ethernet card, and want to connect some fast m.2 I/O, you're going to run into bandwidth problems beyond a single m.2. You might want to consider x99 instead?
Click to expand...


Ah, sorry, thought the NIC was x4. My typo. Yep, they'd be x8/x8.
 
whateverer said:
Also,. you people need to stop spreading lies about z270. The TOTAL NUMBER of PCIe 3 lanes available from the CPU is STILL TWENTY, not 24. Four are reserved for the DMI bus to the chipset, and the 16 left go to other cards, just like ALL recent mainstream platform from Intel.
Click to expand...

Here I thought it was the Kaby Lake CPU that added lanes. Very interesting, thanks for pointing it out: the CPU indeed has only 16 lanes both cases https://ark.intel.com/products/97129/Intel-Core-i7-7700K-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-4_50-GHz https://ark.intel.com/products/88195/Intel-Core-i7-6700K-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-4_20-GHz and has the exact same DMI configuration and speed too. So basically the Z170 spread 4 PCIe from the CPU into 10 PCIe lanes and the Z270 spreads it into 14 but there's not enough upstream by far. What a ....
 
It's not your fault. it's all on Intel's marketing trying to invent something different between the two chip sets.

I just want to clarify, since I've seen this posted on more sites than just our own :D
 
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