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Z97 PCIe bandwidth effect on SLI

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13 Oct 2011
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I'm running 980 SLI on a cheap and cheerful Gigabyte z97 Gaming 3.

I'm wondering if I can manage to justify upgrading to a motherboard with a PCIe bridge chip to give more inter-card bandwidth, and if this would make a noticeable/benchable difference.

Right now I'm obviously on x8/x8 3.0, a motherboard with a bridge chip could make this x16/x16 3.0, and while the bandwidth to the CPU would still be limited by 1150's lack of PCIe lanes, the GPUs should be able to intercommunicate much faster.

Looking at the new Firestrike Ultra benchmarks, the people beating me in 2 card configs seem to all be on LGA2011 or LGA2011-3. I realise that 6 or 8 cores will smash me because of the CPU score, but there is at least one running a quad core 2011 cpu, which I wouldn't expect to, unless the PCIe bandwidth is the factor....
 
Benchable difference? Perhaps. Practical and noticeable in-game performance difference? Nah, these are single digit differences at the best of times. Once the data is loaded over PCIe, it really doesn't need the bus for much else and x8 bandwidth is plenty.
 
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