7970 + SB-E + X79 PCI-E 3.0 working?

[Vega]

So X79 + SB-E and 7970 CAN do PCI-E 3.0? I thought SB-E was not a PCI-E 3.0 CPU, but according to the information below, it is:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5264/sandy-bridge-e-x79-pcie-30-it-works

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/AMD-Radeon-HD-7970-Video-Card-Review/1458/13

Why do I care about PCI-E 3.0? True, for 1-2 7970's running a single monitor I doubt PCI-E will be of much help as stated in this article: http://www.techpowerup.com/157253/P...-Incentive-for-Radeon-HD-7970-Tests.html?cp=1

I could'nt care less about testing PCI-E 3.0 with a single card on a single monitor. The reason I am very interested in PCI-E 3.0 is when you are running 3 or 4 7970's in Eyefinity. When you add 3-4 GPU's, the 16x lanes get chopped down to 8x lanes on X79. Then on top of that, at Eyefinity resolutions data transfer between the cards increases greatly over single monitor resolutions. So in fact PCI-E 3.0 might be a huge boon for power users.

I just wasn't aware that SB-E + X79 + 7970 can actually do PCI-E 3.0. Anyone's thoughts on this? I might just have to upgrade to a SB-E X79 system now.

 

[Brackle]

So X79 + SB-E and 7970 CAN do PCI-E 3.0? I thought SB-E was not a PCI-E 3.0 CPU, but according to the information below, it is:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5264/sandy-bridge-e-x79-pcie-30-it-works

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/AMD-Radeon-HD-7970-Video-Card-Review/1458/13

Why do I care about PCI-E 3.0? True, for 1-2 7970's running a single monitor I doubt PCI-E will be of much help as stated in this article: http://www.techpowerup.com/157253/P...-Incentive-for-Radeon-HD-7970-Tests.html?cp=1

I could'nt care less about testing PCI-E 3.0 with a single card on a single monitor. The reason I am very interested in PCI-E 3.0 is when you are running 3 or 4 7970's in Eyefinity. When you add 3-4 GPU's, the 16x lanes get chopped down to 8x lanes on X79. Then on top of that, at Eyefinity resolutions data transfer between the cards increases greatly over single monitor resolutions. So in fact PCI-E 3.0 might be a huge boon for power users.

I just wasn't aware that SB-E + X79 + 7970 can actually do PCI-E 3.0. Anyone's thoughts on this? I might just have to upgrade to a SB-E X79 system now.

Since we arent even maxing out the Bandwidth of pci-e 2.0, whats the point of 3.0?

I guess because its new and the new standard it would be cool

 

[Vega]

Eh? You can already see in those links that PCI-E 3.0 is providing a performance boost. Granted it isn't gaming (It's compute), but when they make these "PCI-E 2.0" isn't limited benchmarks its usually just a single monitor and 1-2 GPU's. That doesn't stress the PCI-E bus anything like what us 4 GPU/3 monitor guys do. You also have to remember 4 gpu's also drops the slots down to 8x, which is another reason I am positive PCI-E 3.0 will give a boost even for gaming. There is a lot of communications bandwidth required when you are having 4 GPU's talk to each other with eyefinity resolutions.