GPU Bandwidth on the PCIE bus?

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AMD_Gamer

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how much bandwidth do GPU clients use on the PCIE bus?

I am starting to think about a 4XGPU, 4X 8800GS, folding box/file server i plan to build soon and i plan to use a motherboard like the MSI P6N Diamond and use a hardware raid card in the x1 PCIE slot, Now if i was to have a quadcore cpu and all 4 of the PCIE slots running a gpu folding away would it slow anything down if i had a hardware raid card constantly accessing data from the PCIE bus?
 
AMD_Gamer said:
how much bandwidth do GPU clients use on the PCIE bus?

I am starting to think about a 4XGPU, 4X 8800GS, folding box/file server i plan to build soon and i plan to use a motherboard like the MSI P6N Diamond and use a hardware raid card in the x1 PCIE slot, Now if i was to have a quadcore cpu and all 4 of the PCIE slots running a gpu folding away would it slow anything down if i had a hardware raid card constantly accessing data from the PCIE bus?
Click to expand...

PCIe isn't a bus, it's point-to-point. So each lane gets it own 2.5 or 5 gbps of unshared bandwidth.
 
ryan_975 said:
PCIe isn't a shared bus, it's point-to-point. So each lane gets it own 2.5 or 5 gbps of unshared bandwidth.
Click to expand...

Fixed.


The only thing you might need to worry about is whether a single lane PCI-e slot for the RAID card is enough for that card. If the card is made to run in the PCI-e x1 slot then I see no reason to worry about it. The video cards in the other slots will not affect the speed of the RAID card.

 
AMD_Gamer said:
how much bandwidth do GPU clients use on the PCIE bus?

I am starting to think about a 4XGPU, 4X 8800GS, folding box/file server i plan to build soon and i plan to use a motherboard like the MSI P6N Diamond and use a hardware raid card in the x1 PCIE slot, Now if i was to have a quadcore cpu and all 4 of the PCIE slots running a gpu folding away would it slow anything down if i had a hardware raid card constantly accessing data from the PCIE bus?
Click to expand...

Highly doubt it because the gpu is not fully utilizing 4x PCIE.. so an addition 1x demand should not be critical. In a server environment and if your going to use it as such you may find that your PPD on certain cards at certain times drop due to CPU use... and that is what I would expect from heavy raid use. But the guy a few posts up hit it on the nail. yoru only real concern is how well will the Quad handle the server demands and 4x gpu...



 
Use Vista and you won't have any CPU problems. I'm two 9600 GT's away from having nearly this identical setup, except I'm using the K9A2 Platinum and a Phenom 9500. The box is used as a media center/file server/low cost folding beast.
 
chrisf6969 did some testing and we can go as low as PCIe 2x without any slowdowns. I assume it's PCIe 2.0 2x so 1.1 4x would be the equivalent.

 
Xilikon said:
chrisf6969 did some testing and we can go as low as PCIe 2x without any slowdowns. .
Click to expand...
That's what I had suspected as well. Too bad there aren't any cards that can fold with 'slower' PCI-E connectors.

 
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