PCI Express And CrossFire Scaling: Is P55 Good Enough?

[neiroatopelcc]

It was me you were replying to, so I was assuming the obvious.

 

[Guest]

Ok, correct me if I'm wrong, but the PCI bandwidth demand increases with the resolution and quality settings of your game, not with the graphics processing power of your GPU (yes, a more powerful GPU will tend to run at higher settings, meaning there is a correlation but its not a direct link.. stay with me here).

What we can see from this article is that an 8x gate is pretty much at its limits with existing resolutions. Running higher resolutions will increase this limiting effect.

For example: 2x 5870s running 1 screen show a small chocking effect from the 8x gates. Those same 5870s running 3x that resolution in an eyefinity setup will show a far greater difference between 16x and 8x as the CPU struggles to feed the required data for three screens to the GPU. You follow?

In other words, the only people who really NEED the x58 chipset with the extra PCI lanes are power users. This is important because some people seem to think that the above article proves there is not a meaningful difference, but in fact it shows that high/mainstream hardware is nudging the limits of 8x gates, and increases in resolution will only make this worse.

Just my humble opinion.

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]Melbourne boy[/nom]In other words, the only people who really NEED the x58 chipset with the extra PCI lanes are power users. This is important because some people seem to think that the above article proves there is not a meaningful difference, but in fact it shows that high/mainstream hardware is nudging the limits of 8x gates, and increases in resolution will only make this worse.Just my humble opinion.[/citation]

Actually, it's not going to matter what the performance difference is at higher resolutions, if the higher resolutions aren't playable due to running out of GPU power. Pretty much the 5800 series runs out of bandwidth at x8 before it runs out of GPU power, while lesser cards run out of GPU power before they run out of bandwidth at x8.

 

[realneil]

I have two P55 Systems. One is an i7-870 and the other an i5-750 Both use 8GB of DDR3-1600 RAM and Both have good video cards within them. (1GB-5850 & 2GB GTX285) They both play all of my games smoothly and without any problems. I'm only using 22" screens with 1680X1050 resolution right now, so I'm not really stressing anything out so far. I'm not sure how much more I could get with multiple video cards in these circumstances. P55 is alright by me so far. Both of them.