Crossfire bridge still required for modern mobo?

[dascaluandrei]

So I am currently running an HD7790 (don't ask) on a Asrock Fatal1ty Gaming K6+ (Z170). I can get another card, an R7-260X for about 30 bucks, but neither I nor the person selling the other card have a crossfire bridge.
Would I still need one? I mean, the discussion in 2013 was that the lack thereof would limit the number of PCI lanes available for communicating with the CPU. Z170 does, however, have enough lanes, I would say...

 

[renz496]

AMD since the second generation GCN no longer use crossfire bridge. With intel mainstream CPU populating the second PCI-E slot (not the x1 slot) will reduce the speed from x16 to x8 but on PCIE 3 thiswill not going to impact the performance. Even high end gpu have no issue with this probably why we are not seeing PCIE spec not being updated for this past few years.

 

[dascaluandrei]

Thanks. Was just wondering why there's a connector on there at all ( even R7s and R9s had it in the first iteration (260x for instance, which is gcn1.1).

 

[renz496]

AMD do a lot of rebrand starting from R200 series so it can be confusing. for example the R 270 and R 370 is a rebrand of HD7800 series which is first gen GCN. then some people might wonder why R7 370 are not capable of using AMD FreeSync despite being "newer" while older cards like R7 260X can.