mapesdhs :
Hard to see the appeal of this when the ASUS P9X79-E WS offers x16/x16/x16/x16,
though the EVGA is quite a lot cheaper, and perhaps the tradein promo will be handy
for those with older EVGA X79 boards. Tarun, how many of the 6gbit ports are coming
from the Intel chipset? It's the use of Marvell controllers which spoils the SATA3 setup
on many boards.
Ian.
It is not a REAL 16x/16x/16x/16x .. the CPU 40 lanes is 16x/16x/8x REAL , the two PLX Chips makes each 16X splits into two VIRTUAL 16X giving you (16x/16x)/(16x/16x)/8x which means SHARING.
you don't feel it because no GPU uses the full Bandwidth of 16x PCIe 3.0 ... but once you saturate the lanes , the Virtual 16x/16x will run as 8x/8x
performance wise , the virtual 16x/16x/16x/16x will give you the same benchmarks of the 8x/8x/8x/8x using the same cpu
and it is WORSE in Haswell with PLX chips the Haswell gives only 16 TOTAL lanes .
it is NOT REAL.
the REAL thing is how many Lanes the CPU is giving you.
40 lanes here and that's 16x/8x/8x/8x or 16x/16x/8x
there are no cards that needs more than 8x PCIe3.0 even the Titans. and in case a 2xTitan Card is out which might need more than 8x , it will be limited to 2 cards and will use 16x/16x only.
PLX is 2x 16X sharing one 16X bus with 16X connection for both.
The ONLY way to have REAL 16x/16x/16x/16x is to use a dual CPU xeon Motherboard , each Xeon will give you 40 lanes !!! total 80 Lanes this will give you TRUE 4 way SLI 16X and a spare 16X as well that can be split into 8x/8x for cards
16x/16x/16x/16x and 8x/8x , 6 slots , 80 lanes !!!