PCI Express 2.0 vs 1.0

[zanthor]

Ugh... so I'm looking into PCI Express and it's effect... PCI Express 2.0 doubles the bandwidth between the system board and the addon, so a 16 lane PCI Express 2.0 slot provides 8gb/second bi-directional bandwidth or a pair of PCI Express 2.0 video cards in SLI would actually have 16GB bandwidth each direction...

Now I don't plan on going SLI since that does nothing for me in WoW... but my video card does support PCI Express 2.0 and I'm not looking at cutting corners on this next upgrade... however it does increase the price by $150!! I can get a mainboard with all the features I want except PCI Express 2.0 for around $100, and the two contenders I want with PCI Express are both $250~...

So, can anyone give me real world feedback on how this has affected their games/benchmarks/etc?

Thanks,

[Vos]

are you talking about an x38 board? everything I have read says the video cards aren't ready to take advantage of pcix2.0 and it'll will be the next gen or even then gen after that, that will really take advantage of it.

let me ask you this question... are you going with dd3 1600 ram? or at least a board that supports it? if not then the same reasoning applies to pcix 2.0....

personally I'd rather spend 150 bucks on a mobo now that does what I want and 2 years down the road another 150 for a new board if I need to, than spend 300 bucks on a board that does alot of stuff most of which I don't want yet, that may or may not do what I need 2 years from now...


This of course is all the opinion of someone who doesn't own a pcix 2.0 mobo, so take it for what it's worth...


edit: ah forgot you said sli, so you likely are looking at the 780i found this info....

PCI Express 2.0 calls for a signaling rate of 5.0GT/s, and the nForce 200 delivers that in full to each of its 32 lanes, yielding 1GB/s of bandwidth per lane. The nForce 200 is also capable of routing signals directly between graphics cards connected to it, so in two-way SLI configurations, it handles any SLI traffic not passed over the bridge connector without hitting the north bridge. Three-way SLI setups hang the third graphics card off the south bridge, requiring that traffic not routed through the SLI bridge connector hop between the nForce 200 and the MCP through the north bridge. SLI threesomes are likely to be rare, but single-card and even two-way SLI configs are not, which brings us to the nForce 200's connection with the 780i SPP. With the nForce 200 serving up 32 lanes of PCIe 2.0 at 1GB/s of bandwidth per lane, you'd expect the chip's link with the north bridge to be pretty beefy. And you'd be wrong. The link in question is described as an "Nvidia interface" with 16 lanes running at a 4.5GT/s signaling rate. This yields aggregate interconnect bandwidth of only 14.4GB/s—well short of the 32GB/s that the nForce 200 supplies to graphics cards connected to it. According to Nvidia, 14.4GB/s is still enough to "enable full performance of PCI Express 2.0 graphics cards." We'll be putting that claim to the test in a future article; time constraints didn't permit doing so for this review.

[zanthor]

https://secure.newegg.com/NewVersion...hListTitle=Moo

This is more fucking around than anything, but it has the mainboard that I was looking at. I'm not interested in SLI but my current 8800gt is PCI Express 2.0 compliant.

[Vos]

couple of things.... 1 I would get this ram (x2) over what you chose http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820231145, same company, better sticks, and cheaper... and higher bandwidth memory will for sure eek out a few more fps
2. unless you need a particular port on that sound card, it's pretty worthless in Vista. They changed the audio in vista to be software only, so there's no hardware acceleration. Creative has some hacked stuff, but it's far from fully baked and creative is a horrible company for support.

I think it's a mistake to spend 150 bones on that mobo just for pcix 2.0. You might also consider the GTX or Ultra 8800s over the GTS. The G92 based cards do have better shader perfomance, but the High end G80's have wider memory bus on the card itself (256bit-62GBs vs. 384bit-86GB/s)
BTW I have that case, and love it.