P67 PCI-E Bandwidth Concerns

[oldbustedjorn]

I'm probably overthinking this, but I can't get it out of my head so I thought I'd come here and ask for advice. I've done plenty of searching on the topic and found lots of information, but there is one piece that I still don't understand completely.

I'm building a new system and here is what I have so far.

- Either i5-2500k or i7-2600k, with a little bit of overclocking (nothing that requires extra cooling, but I will be buying a board with decent VRM)
- 2xCrucial M4 SSDs, one 256GB and one 64GB, both sata 6gb
- Possibly one 1TB 7200rpm sata 6gb
- 2xRadeon 6970 in crossfire... with no plans to get more

From what I've read, it seems as though x8/x8 will be good enough (tiny % difference between that and x16/x16).

The question is, does that still hold with all the sata 6gb I'm running? Do they ever even share bandwidth, or is it always separate from the pci-e lanes? If there is any chance of a bottleneck, how would I go about gathering that from the mobo specs? Do P67 (or Z68, though I see no reason to go with that) mobo always have the same amount of lanes (not counting NF200)?

Thanks!

 

[Tsumi]

The SATA slots do not share lanes with the PCI-E lanes unless explicitly said in the manual, and is usually very rare. I think I've only seen it happen on a few x58 boards. SATA is usually controlled through the southbridge or external controller, which are connected in a separate interface to the CPU.

Yes, P67 and Z68 always have the same amount of lanes. That is the design of the chipset/CPU.

 

[oldbustedjorn]

Thanks, that's basically what I was looking for...

There are so many different variation of just P67/Z68 motherboards that I was looking for some reason to exclude some.