970 and 990 I need to know the difference.

[Thomas Lee]

Hey, I'm just curious about how these "pins"/"chipsets" work. Would a CPU thats 970 work on a motherboard of 990? vice versa. Also what is the difference, i dont want any in depth answer like bits and transferspeed, just enough to know which is better and a general knowledge of the two.

Thanks.

 

[slomo4sho]

The primary difference between the chipsets is the PCIe configuration. 970 chipset has a single PCIe 2.0 x16 connection, 990X splits the PCIe 2.0 x16 into two separate PCIe 2.0 x8 connections for SLI/Crossfire support and the 990FX chipset has two full PCIe 2.0 x16 which can be split into PCIe 2.0 x8 for a x8/x8/x8/x8 configuration for 1-4 GPU support.