İ7-8700 PCİ-E lanes?

[hosneyg61]

İm about to do a new build and thought why not go with the new z370 platform. İ decided to go with the i7 8700 since the k doesent really have a considerable advantage for the extra cash. The only thing is, wherever i looked i couldnt find any info about the PCİ-E lanes. Does anyone know how many PCİ-E lanes it supports?

 

[alexoiu]

Max # of PCI Express Lanes 16 https://ark.intel.com/products/126686/Intel-Core-i7-8700-Processor-12M-Cache-up-to-4_60-GHz

 

[rhysiam]

You get 16 full-speed PCIe lanes from the CPU: https://ark.intel.com/products/126686/Intel-Core-i7-8700-Processor-12M-Cache-up-to-4_60-GHz
Paired with a Z370 board, you also get a further 24 PCIe lanes from the chipset: https://ark.intel.com/products/125903/Intel-Z370-Chipset

Note that the chipset lanes all share a higher latency ~x4 PCIe 3.0 link to the CPU. So although it's great for things like networking and one or two high speed NVMe drives, those chipset lanes aren't optimal for anything ultra-performance sensitive like GPUs.

 

[hosneyg61]

So i wont have any bottleneck issues due to the 16 pcie lanes the cpu has, because the chipset provides me with an extra 8. Say i put one nvme drive and 2 SSD sata drives in, i wouldnt have any issues correct?

 

[rhysiam]

So i wont have any bottleneck issues due to the 16 pcie lanes the cpu has, because the chipset provides me with an extra 8. Say i put one nvme drive and 2 SSD sata drives in, i wouldnt have any issues correct?

Nope, that's exactly what the consumer grade gear is designed to handle flawlessly. One GPU, one high end NVMe drive and a bunch of SATA drives. That'll all go just fine on Z370. If you get an SLI capable board it'll even work just fine for two GPUs (giving x8 lanes to each - which is just fine).

It's where you need 3 GPUs, or 3+ NVMe drives and expect them all to run at full pace that the limitations of the consumer platform start to appear.