Advice Needed

[channel]

Anyone know of a motherboard that is 1155 socket and has 2x pci-e 16x? Unlike my Asus P8P67 that has pci-e 16x & pci-e x4?

I've looked and all I can seem to find are 16x&8x at best.

 

[The Mac]

No such animal.

all sli boards are all 1x x16 , or 8x8.

With the new chips, the number of lanes are controlled by the CPU, not the chipset.

there arent enough PCIe lanes in SB for 16x16.

Sandy Bridge has 20 total, youed need at least 36 for 16x16. The extra 4 are for the southbridge stuff.

The boards usuing the NF200 chip, use multiplexing to achieve 16x8x8, but its not real.

you will have to wait for x79 and SB-E or Ivy Bridge for tru 16x16

 

[cdotter]

Can modern video cards even saturate an 8x PCI-E lane?

 

[Spudsdude]

Can modern video cards even saturate an 8x PCI-E lane?

Basically, no. Maybe the 590 / 6990 and even then the difference is at best only a few %.

So what you want is a board that does 8x/8x and not the 16x/4x most of the less expensive boards do.

 

[The Mac]

if you go for a sli board (8x8) make sure you get a gen 3 board

the earlier ones wont support PCIe 3.0, the switches are too old...

all of the x16-x4 (non-sli) boards will support 3.0 but not sli/xfire, obviously

 

[channel]

I understand what your saying so my 6850's at 16x&4x performance won't have than much of a difference on a 16x&8x board?

 

[The Mac]

go with a gen3-sli board they will run at 8x8....u wont notice any slowdown, maybe 1 or 2% from earlier chipsets that had more lanes...16x4 (non-sli), u will notice...

6800 has higher clocks than 6900, so youll probobly notice the saturation a bit more...

assuming u plan on keeping them for a while, a gen3-p67 sli or a gen3-z68 sli will do u good...

btw, ive been saying sli, but the tech is splitting the lanes, so it holds true also for xfire also..