Gigabyte Sets Record Straight on PCIe 3.0 Support

[Marcus Yam]

Gigabyte wants to clear the air surrounding its PCIe 3.0 support in its 6 series motherboards.

Gigabyte Sets Record Straight on PCIe 3.0 Support : Read more

 

[tecmo34]

Nice story to get both sides of the story & it would have been nice to hear from ASUS or ASRock on their thoughts.

Good Job Marcus & Chris...

 

[hpglow]

I'm not sure why anyone would care other than people running top end cards in SLI/Crossfire. The average user running a single 560ti will never saturate the pcie bus even v2 at 8x lanes.

 

[ikyung]

[citation][nom]hpglow[/nom]I'm not sure why anyone would care other than people running top end cards in SLI/Crossfire. The average user running a single 560ti will never saturate the pcie bus even v2 at 8x lanes.[/citation]
Well the 7000 series are said to release Q4 this year and the high end 7900 line coming in Q1 2012. Along with GTX 600 series. Both cards are said to be the first line of graphics card to use 22nm architecture and PCI 3.0. So I guess the motherboard companies are getting ready for it.

 

[beenthere]

So basically it's all hype for now and maybe for the foreseeable future.

 

[roscolo]

Much ado about nothing.

 

[Guest]

i wanna ask them about uefi boot for gigabyte series p 31 es3g

 

[alyoshka]

Really? And I thought PCIe 3 Was supposed to be 32 GBps and not 16 as 16 we already have on our boards....
I have a funny feeling that Gigabyte is beating around the bush.

PCIe architecture Total bandwidth for x16 link
PCIe 1.x ~8GB/s
PCIe 2.x ~16GB/s
PCIe 3.0 ~32GB/s

From their Presentations they are still running all configurations at 16X
So it really proves that MSI is correct.

 

[alyoshka]

When is (The Board) Has just a single PCIe 3.0 slot... it ought to be able to work at 32GB/s
When it has 2 PCIe Slots they ought to work at 16X each
When it has 3 PCIe Slots it ought to work at 8X 16X 8X or 8X 8X 16X or 16X 8X 8X ( That damn switch that they have shown in their slides should be here so that which ever way or what ever card requires more bandwidth gets it automatically without having to be open the case and shuffle the cards in various slots)
When it has 4 PCIe Slots it ought to work at 8X 8X 8X 8X

It's pretty simple math.

 

[Mark Heath]

Just personally, I think the MSI marketing guys drank a little bit too much red cordial or something that day

 

[mkrijt]

Well, I think the future will tell how PCIe 3.0 ready all off these boards are.

 

[xsamitt]

Yes what's up with that.....32GB/s was the impression I was under as well for the new spec.Now some watered down version.We are getting the shaft again from the new boards.

 

[drwho1]

I think I"ll wait for PCIe 4.0

 

[borden5]

is that what people mean by counter troll?

 

[eddieroolz]

Making some popcorn to watch the latest in cat fights

 

[bunz_of_steel]

Tecmo34 agreed, good job Marcus Yam, Chris Angelini!! Nice to keep abreast of future improvements. One of the reasons why I read THG. Good to understand the architect underneath it all and improves my knowledge of what a motherboard is. Not just a bunch of IC & copper!

 

[torque79]

Well, when the first gen of PCIe came out nothing could saturate the bus for quite some time. AGP users still had cards coming out for a while, and even when the last cards manufactured for AGP were coming out only then were they just starting to saturate the bus more than AGP could handle.

Of course PCIe3.0 will not be saturated for a while, but if you know it's coming out very soon would you not prefer to have full PCIe3 support for when you upgrade your video card down the road? This is obviously a concern for someone buying a new pc.

 

[geekapproved]

"Gigabyte boasts exceptionally strong technical and R&D capabilities, particularly when it comes to bios developement".

Really? Is that why their the only one's not using the new UEFI bios? Main reason I left Gigabyte for Asrock is because Gigabyte is behind on the bios and still uses the old format.

 

[TeraMedia]

It sounds like Gigabyte took a page out of the "HDCP-ready" book. I was one of the happy victims of that marketing BS back in '05: even though the GPUs on the cards were capable of dealing with HDCP, there were no key chips on the cards so cards could not actually stream HDCP-encoded content over HDMI, and hence any protected blu-ray or HD-DVD had to be played over VGA instead.

Now, whenever I see the word "ready" in technology marketing, I think, "not fully implemented".

 

[False_Dmitry_II]

[citation][nom]torque79[/nom]Of course PCIe3.0 will not be saturated for a while, but if you know it's coming out very soon would you not prefer to have full PCIe3 support for when you upgrade your video card down the road? This is obviously a concern for someone buying a new pc.[/citation]

Precisely. I'm running the very first 780G chipset mobo that was released (by gigabyte) still with a Phenom II 720 x3 and DDR2. At some point I will eventually have to upgrade mobo/ram again and when I do I want to try to repeat the same thing and have something that is as crazily drop-in upgradable as I have now (and it's not like it's quite tapped out its potential yet, but it's close).

 

[CaedenV]

[citation][nom]alyoshka[/nom]Really? And I thought PCIe 3 Was supposed to be 32 GBps and not 16 as 16 we already have on our boards....I have a funny feeling that Gigabyte is beating around the bush.PCIe architecture Total bandwidth for x16 linkPCIe 1.x ~8GB/sPCIe 2.x ~16GB/sPCIe 3.0 ~32GB/sFrom their Presentations they are still running all configurations at 16XSo it really proves that MSI is correct.[/citation]

v1 was 256 MB/s per lane
v2 is 512 MB/s per lane
v3 will be 1GB/s per lane

If you have 32 lanes of PCIe2 (in a 16+16 config) then you would get 16GB/s total.

Keep in mind that only the highest end dual GPU cards run more than 8 lanes, so the upgrade should allow us to run quad SLI over 2 cards without bottleneck.

Considering I am not made of gold this really doesn't rock my world much, but at the same time higher bandwidth means lower latency. Plus the next gen of GPUs are going to be stellar even in the mid-high range, which is what I am really waiting for!

 

[JohnnyLucky]

Interesting article. I knew PCI-e 3.0 had been officially adpoted as a standard and that motherboards would eventually be PCI-e 3.0 capable. I knew what the implications were for PCI-e based solid state drives but I wasn't sure what it meant for graphic cards. Looks like we will find out in the near future.

 

[josejones]

I started a thread about PCIe 3.0.
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/296572-30-where-promised

Tom's has an article from August 2010 saying we should've been able to expect PCIe 3.0 motherboards by last month. I have yet to even hear about any such mobos from the AMD camp.

It was explained to me in my thread that in order to have true PCIe 3.0 support everything in the chain link must support it or it's only as good as the weakest link in the chain i.e. mobo, CPU, chipsets, GPU etc.

 

[cangelini]

Correct Jose. A motherboard with PCIe 3.0 support is unable to do anything special without a card able to communicate using that same protocol, for instance. And because Intel builds PCI Express into its processors now (it's not a chipset function any more), we also need the CPUs as well.

 

[SteelCity1981]

This is why i don't adopt early technology for reasons above. I wait until they get all the kinks and crap worked out first.