PCI-E 3.0? What's the deal with cornuts?

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Spare-Flair

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I currently have an ASUS P8 Z68 V-PRO and have the opportunity to sell this board and system to someone as ASUS has come out with the P8 Z68 GEN 3 boards with PCI-E 3.0 now.

So what's the deal with PCI-E 3.0? Will it really impact my long term ability to upgrade or are the benefits not even tangible right now or for the near future (lets say 12 months).

Should I bother? It's quite an expensive leap to the GEN 3 board. (If I sell this 2500K & Z68 V-Pro, I'd probably get the GEN 3 and a 2600K).
 
It's not used at this time, and won't be needed for a very long time to come... definitely not within 12 months. I'd say "don't bother", myself :).
 
By the time it's used widely, I would imagine that the price of the boards would be quite lower by comparison. There's little to gain here by being an early adopter.
 
Well the upcoming AMD 7000 series cards will be PCIe 3.0, but it is backwards compatible with 2.0. If you are upgrading now it's nice to have for future proofing, but we all know how that goes in the enthusiast system building world. Q1 of 2012 is their release date target.

Kepler will be 3.0 compatible also, but the important thing to remember is not to focus just on the graphics card market. Being 3.0 compliant also means that there are more lanes available as a whole for the entire chipset/motherboard.
 
Appa said:
Kepler will be 3.0 compatible also, but the important thing to remember is not to focus just on the graphics card market. Being 3.0 compliant also means that there are more lanes available as a whole for the entire chipset/motherboard.
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PCIe 3.0 doesn't change the number of lanes, it just makes the existing ones faster. So a GEN 3 motherboard doesn't have any more lanes to use than a PCIe 2.0 motherboard, they are just able to support higher speeds.
 
Forceman said:
PCIe 3.0 doesn't change the number of lanes, it just makes the existing ones faster. So a GEN 3 motherboard doesn't have any more lanes to use than a PCIe 2.0 motherboard, they are just able to support higher speeds.
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Oh sorry, my mistake. I misunderstood the spec and change, so the upcoming chipsets are supporting more lanes (like X79) and it's just a bandwidth increase.
 
PCI-E 3.0 is going to be real important for those of us that like to run 4x GPU's. In this past limited PCI-E lanes have really hurt those of us that play at super high resolutions and refresh rates.

I would really like for these companies to cut the crap and get PCI-E 3.0 sorted. Not knowing if I buy a X79 if PCI-E 3.0 will ever work is pretty lame. Everyone seems to have a different opinion on that one and I hate "it should" and speculation. That usually ends up with me getting screwed. :)
 
That is a completely pointless upgrade since the 2600k would still limit the board to pcie 2 and IvyBridge will get a new chipset that supports pci-e 3.0 so the "future-proofness" of a z68 board is really limited even with pci-3.0 support.

You would be a lot better off waiting until you really need a upgrade in a few years and get IvyBridge or Haswell with a new board then.

Even if you buy a new GPU with pci-e 3.0, the current gen cards don't fully use pci-e 2.0 and even if the next gen ones need more bandwidth, pci-e 2.0 has headroom and future chipsets will probably have more available lanes versus the hoping to benefit from pci-e 3.0 on the z68.
 
It's not worth the upgrade. It won't matter to 95% of the people. And will still require an ivy bridge CPU.
 
Vega said:
PCI-E 3.0 is going to be real important for those of us that like to run 4x GPU's. In this past limited PCI-E lanes have really hurt those of us that play at super high resolutions and refresh rates.

I would really like for these companies to cut the crap and get PCI-E 3.0 sorted. Not knowing if I buy a X79 if PCI-E 3.0 will ever work is pretty lame. Everyone seems to have a different opinion on that one and I hate "it should" and speculation. That usually ends up with me getting screwed. :)
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Dude, your running 6990's on 8x slots. Are you really that worried about bandwidth? And do you really thing once you bump that up to 16x slots that they will be a bottleneck? Not being sarcastic here, you have put the money out on this system, I have to assume you have done your homework. But everything I have read is we are just starting to be limited by the 8x slot and the 16x still has plenty of legs left.

And dont even think about saying "future-proofing", you know as well as I do you are going to keep buying the latest mobo/cpu combo out there when its available. :p (darn people with deep pockets, grrrrr)
 
I wonder if some company will put a bunch of cpus together and connected it for processing through a
pci e port? Why for marketing of course. I read Tilera has made a 100 core processor :)
 
Gen 3.0 will make a difference with the proper card.

My upgrades on MBs are usually 2-3 years, so in my case a board with 3.0 capability would really be a good deal........

I'm anxiously waiting for the Rampage IV Formula to be available.:p
 
magoo said:
Gen 3.0 will make a difference with the proper card.
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Time will tell, but I doubt you'll see any significant difference for a single card even in the next 2-3 years. There just isn't that much data being transferred for a single card.

I'd imagine it would be nice for RAID cards using x4 slots though.
 
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