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New 7000x series GPU

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danike

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Joined
Apr 12, 2006
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I am ready to build my rig, should I get a motherboard with pci xpress 3.0 to "future-proof" or is it not important?
 
danike said:
I am ready to build my rig, should I get a motherboard with pci xpress 3.0 to "future-proof" or is it not important?
Click to expand...

Sure, unless there is a ridiculously big price difference. I believe both Kepler and 7000 series will be pcie 3.0 cards. Who knows what's in store with those cards and that bus. Maybe some sick feature will take advantage of pcie 3.0.
 
It won't be essential, maybe if you're thinking of keeping the motherboard for a few years and are thinking of getting a geforce 600/radeon 7000 series or later dual GPU type card. Otherwise any PCIe 2.0/2.1 x16 slot will be more than enough bandwidth.
 
The midrange 78xx still uses GDDR5 from what I've read. The 79xx cards will use XDR2 though and the extra bandwidth from that added with the PCIe 3.0 will be amazing. So just depends on what you're gonna get down the road. I don't see any reason not to get the best of what you can since you're building a new rig to last you for the next few years.
 
danike said:
I am ready to build my rig, should I get a motherboard with pci xpress 3.0 to "future-proof" or is it not important?
Click to expand...

Granted it would be a nice to also have a PCI express 3.0 motherboard and PCI express 3.0 videocard out for future proof reasons. But I am really waiting for Asus to make a blackedition PCI Express 3.0 motherboard or Gigabyte assasin series motherboard. But that's just me :)

Remember it won't kill you to install a PCI Express 3.0 videocard in a PCI Express 2.1 slot. I doubt there are many games that even push the PCI Express 2.1 specs to the max.
 
DarkDonut said:
The midrange 78xx still uses GDDR5 from what I've read. The 79xx cards will use XDR2 though and the extra bandwidth from that added with the PCIe 3.0 will be amazing. So just depends on what you're gonna get down the road. I don't see any reason not to get the best of what you can since you're building a new rig to last you for the next few years.
Click to expand...

The XDR thing was largely speculated to be a rumour.

Even so, PCIe 2.0 won't be saturated unless the graphics cores are much, much more powerful. The bandwidth provided by XDR, or GDDR6 (or whatever) is largely independent, unrelated and un-influenced by PCIe bandwidth.

In short, I don't think we'll need PCIe 3.0 until the 9xxx series of AMD GPU's.

There are very few boards that support true PCIe 3.0 right now, so be careful. Additionally, it's also possible that a GPU powerful enough to require PCIe 3.0 will require a CPU more powerful than SB/IB for full performance (Sort of how an oc'd Q6600 in a PCIe 1.0 bus just doesn't really cut it anymore) This may mean a new socket anyways. IMHO, get the best PCIe 2.0 board you can afford, rather than a more expensive PCIe 3.0 board with fewer features.
 
I don't see any more than a 50% performance boost coming, so the new cards are going to be less impacted by having PCIe2 instead of PCIe3, than say, a current high-end SLI/crossfire pair will be using 8x instead of 16x link speed. Since that difference is generally accepted to be about 5%, I wouldn't worry too much about this issue.
 
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