sandy bridge 16x16?

scubes · 12 Mar 2011 at 14:56

ive been reading though various post about these motherboards and my question is is there noneof them that can do 16x16 for sli?. is it the way they are made? is there any coming out with 16x16...
thanks for reading this ..
regards scubes....

gary996 · 12 Mar 2011 at 14:59

Gigabyte UD7 does. But if you put any other expansion card in on top of the 2 graphic cards it doesn't

rpstewart · 12 Mar 2011 at 15:09

There aren't enough PCIe lanes in the native CPU & P67 chipset to allow two true 16x slots. It's only possible on the UD7 because Gigabyte have added an additional NF200 bridge.

postmanfw · 12 Mar 2011 at 15:50

The drop in performance is very little just a few %.

Still cant decide what board to get myself for xfire

DrBombcrater · 12 Mar 2011 at 16:22

scubes said:
ive been reading though various post about these motherboards and my question is is there noneof them that can do 16x16 for sli?. is it the way they are made? is there any coming out with 16x16...
thanks for reading this ..

There are no boards that can do 16x/16x, because the Sandy Bridge CPUs only have 16 PCI-e lanes. Some boards fake it by using a PCI-e bridge, which allows the manufacturer to claim the board is 16x/16x when it actually performs like an 8x/8x setup.

But it's not really a problem in performance terms. 8x/8x is fine even for a pair of high-end graphics cards, heck even the 16x/4x configuration on cheaper Sandy Bridge boards is 90-95% as fast as 16x/16x.

Liquid · 12 Mar 2011 at 17:27

As already mentioned here, the cpu only has enough bandwith to offer 8x in dual video card configuration. the benefits from boards with 2 full 16x lanes are limited due to the reduction at cpu level anyway. It is also worth noting that it's pci express v2.00 inside the chip, so the bandwith is double that of previous generation. in the end there is little between 8x 8x and 16x 16x.

scubes · 12 Mar 2011 at 19:27

thanks for the replys fellas good info there thank you

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