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Wait for PCIe 3.0?

E

Eisenblut

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Feb 23, 2011
Messages
1,108
Is there any inkling that nVidia's Kepler- or AMD's Southern Islands-based cards will use PCEe 3.0?

I ask because I see MSI is the first out with a PCIe 3.0 motherboard and I am coming up on a full upgrade from my current system (3.1Ghz Brisbane, 4GB and 4870 1GB, OS on SSD) to a 2600K with possibly a Z68 board and, preferrably, a 600-series nVidia card. At least, that was the plan until I saw the MSI board (Z68A-GD80 (G3)).

Thanks.
 
I wouldn't bother. It took quite a few cards generations before pci-express 2.0 became even remotly limiting factor.
 
video cards have to saturate pcie 2.0 before they can even think about getting onto 3.0 ;)

I dont think the upcoming generation will be pcie 3.0 because it would require a HUGE (near double) jump in bandwidth usage in order to show any performance difference between 3.0 and 2.0

However, i do believe that the next generation SSD's will get close to utilizing pcie 3.0. Just look at the read/write of the intel 720 series. But, good luck affording a huge SLC SSD without winning the lottery first :p
 
Yeah, PCIe 3.0 is an awful lot of bandwidth to push (32GB). Thanks for the answers.

I just wish some info on Kepler would make its way out.
 
Yeah, but consider Intel's current strategy of only putting 16 lanes on their mainstream's on-chip PCIe controller. The more bandwidth you can squeeze out of it, the further you can conceivably shrink the video card(s)'s share of PCIe lanes without hampering performance (letting you use more add-in cards like digital TV tuners, Revodrives, etc).
 
djsb said:
Yeah, but consider Intel's current strategy of only putting 16 lanes on their mainstream's on-chip PCIe controller. The more bandwidth you can squeeze out of it, the further you can conceivably shrink the video card(s)'s share of PCIe lanes without hampering performance (letting you use more add-in cards like digital TV tuners, Revodrives, etc).
Click to expand...

That only matters if you have multi GPU systems or GPU + revo drive both are outside typical user budgets.
 
Pretty sure the Gigabyte boards officially support PCIe-3.0 (pending Ivy Bridge and 3.0 cards...). But really we need to be realistic here; I can only think of one or two industries that actually need PCIe-x16 3.0 bandwidth and consumers barely need a quarter of that bandwidth for a GPU to still work well (PCIe-x8 2.0).
 
Current cards are actually pci-e 2.1 so aside from bandwith I'm not sure that there would be any differences.
 
night_2004 said:
Pretty sure the Gigabyte boards officially support PCIe-3.0 (pending Ivy Bridge and 3.0 cards...). But really we need to be realistic here; I can only think of one or two industries that actually need PCIe-x16 3.0 bandwidth and consumers barely need a quarter of that bandwidth for a GPU to still work well (PCIe-x8 2.0).
Click to expand...

Yes I heard on here that they are going to somehow conform to PCI-e 3.0 with a BIOS update.. I know it sounds silly but I guess the boards were built with this in mind?

Anyway, I'm curious whether or not ASUS and the other big mobo manufacturers will follow suit. If anything it's a good marketing gimmick.
 
CallMeTheStig said:
Yes I heard on here that they are going to somehow conform to PCI-e 3.0 with a BIOS update.. I know it sounds silly but I guess the boards were built with this in mind?

Anyway, I'm curious whether or not ASUS and the other big mobo manufacturers will follow suit. If anything it's a good marketing gimmick.
Click to expand...

Well since the chipset can't magically be updated I'm sure they're talking about only the 16 lanes from the CPU to the PCIe-x16 sockets where you'd shove a GPU in there. It's just a matter of being able to meet the electrical specifications (available by the time the boards were designed?).
 
I am having this conundrum myself. Years and years of building systems and waiting for the market to come out with new technology just doesn't pay off till they have been released for 3-4 months and the second round of hardware comes out for them. Motherboard manufactures are notorious for advertising all things there boards can do, sort of like wireless networking companies do.

However the real issue with PCI-E 3.0 is not just the motherboard, it also depends on the CPU and Video Card supporting it. I would happily buy a new board that supports the "G3" PCIE lanes if I knew that I did not have to rely on a future processor to make it work. Video cards are very easy to resell, used processors not so much.

I could get the board now and then what? Spend 200-300 for a processor that will not run the new standard and I suppose I could reuse my old video card and wait for the next round of cards that will support it. However it is the processor part of the equation that has me ticked off about this.

Best case scenario right now is that AMD actually puts out a contender in Bulldozer and the new line of boards/processors support PCI-E 3.0, that I would jump on and would give AMD an edge at least till Intel got on the ball.
 
Even if you have native PCI-E 3.0, it really won't make much of a difference, since really all that PCI-E 2.0 made possible was multi-gpu cards, and even those aren't pushing its limits.

If there is anything that will necessitate faster versions of PCI Express, it will be solid-state storage devices. I wouldn't mind having a SSD or 2 that transfers at 32GB/sec, it would be like a very large ramdisk...

woodscomp said:
Best case scenario right now is that AMD actually puts out a contender in Bulldozer and the new line of boards/processors support PCI-E 3.0, that I would jump on and would give AMD an edge at least till Intel got on the ball.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, there won't be an AMD PCI-E 3.0 platform until the FM2, C2012 and G2012 sockets launch. I think the 9-series chipsets are the end-of-the-line for AM3/+, that's if the rumors of 'Komodo' launching on FM2 are correct.
 
I'm betting Maxwell will be the PCI-E 3.0 incarnation from nvidia. Kepler is too soon.

I think 3.0 will happen a lot sooner than some people think, however, since NF200 chips are popular for four-card setups.
 
While I agree that 3.0 would benefit SSD's I doubt it will have much impact on the industry. Those types of setups would be geared towards the enthusiast crowd and that crowd is dwindling. I am doubtful that many OEM's would be willing to spend much effort or time to develop properly running and easy to install and configure PCI-E cards for there drives. There just has not been enough done to the PC over the years to make people stay with the platform.
 
hierovision said:
I'm betting Maxwell will be the PCI-E 3.0 incarnation from nvidia. Kepler is too soon.

I think 3.0 will happen a lot sooner than some people think, however, since NF200 chips are popular for four-card setups.
Click to expand...

Nvidia's 5xx series and AMD's 6xxx series are already pci-e 2.1 compliant. I would be shocked if the upcoming cards from either company weren't pci-e 3.0 compliant.
 
You're probably right. Kepler could be the introduction to PCI-E 3.0 and Maxwell could be the "tock" ;)
 
I don't see so many differences from pcie 1.0 to the present 2.0...and I don't think this one will be a big jump from 2.0 either, and it will still work fine on today's videocards.
 
If you haven't bought anything yet then I'd say sure, get a pcie 3.0 motherboard. Chances are the new cards will all be pcie 3.0. To echo what others have said, we barely take advantage of pcie 2.0 to it's full capacity. However, who knows if there will be some crazy incentive that pcie 3.0 brings to the table and to find out later that it kicks ass and simply buy a new board now without itt is pointless. I'm on pcie 2.0 but I know if 3.0 kicks ass especially for sli/crossfire and eyefinity/surround then I'd sell and get a new board asap.

Buy a 3.0 board as a just in case type of deal. :)
 
CallMeTheStig said:
Yes I heard on here that they are going to somehow conform to PCI-e 3.0 with a BIOS update.. I know it sounds silly but I guess the boards were built with this in mind?

Anyway, I'm curious whether or not ASUS and the other big mobo manufacturers will follow suit. If anything it's a good marketing gimmick.
Click to expand...

It is in fact a marketing gimmick... well sort of the PCIE controller for Ivy Bridge is integrated into the cpu so any Z68/P67 should be able to be "PCIE 3.0 Capable" However the available bandwith will remain the same so what you get from Gigabytes bios update is the ability to essentially turn you PCIE 2.0 x16 slot in to a PCIE 3.0 x8 slot so technically they are not lying but you won't magically be able to double your PCIE bandwith with a bios update.

That being said you will be able to make use of the new PCIE communication protocol which has practically zero overhead compared to the PCIE 2.0 protocol which has about 20% overhead.

So yeah the bios update won't give you full PCIE 3.0 speeds but it will give about 20% more Bandwidth (Assuming you have an ivy bridge CPU and a PCIE 3.0 GPU) keep in mind though that if GIGAbyte can do this through a bios update all the other MOBO manufactures can as well.
 
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