PCIE Lanes and cpu ?!?!?!

[BaysideLukaz]

Salutations my fellow geeks, nerds and everything in between

I've heard talk of pcie lanes on cpu's. Does this mean that you would benefit from getting a cpu with, let's just say "2x pcie x16 lanes" in order to fully utilize 2 GTX 1080's? And would I be able to run an ssd in the other pcie lanes on my motherboard?

I am currently running a liquid cooled fx9590, on a sabertooth 990fx r.2.0 Motherboard with a single GTX 1070. Corsair vengence 4x4gb 1600 mhz RAM.
I will soon rebuild to a liquid cooled i7 7700k on a ASUS Z270 Maximus formula IX Motherboard. GSkill Trident Z 2x8 gb 3000 mhz ram.
I plan on upgrading to 2x GTX1070 sli config. or single 1080, then some time in the future 2x 1080 sli confg😍.

Hence the question about cpu pcie lanes.... I just found that the I7 7700k has up to 1x16, 2x8, 1x8+2x4.

 

[boosted1g]

So there is PCI lanes for the GPU (the x16 slots), then there is a seperate controller for PCIe lanes for the x1 slots and the storage.

Even the new 1080 ti can not saturate 8x PCIe 3.0 lanes so tow in x8/x8 configuraiton is still completely viable.

 

[LowlySkeleton]

As boosted1g has stated, you will do find even if you gpu only has 8x lanes available. You can see some tests and benchmarks others have run here:
http://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/2488-pci-e-3-x8-vs-x16-performance-impact-on-gpus
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Impact-of-PCI-E-Speed-on-Gaming-Performance-518/

Even running only 8x PCI-E 2.0, you will not see much of a difference in gaming performance. Extra PCI-E lanes would be nice is certain builds, but not one that an average gamer would be using. If you wanted a server to have multiple raid cards connected to many drives, you will definitely benefit from having more PCI-E lanes available.

On the topic of SLI...you will see marginal, if any, benefit from running more than 1gpu at a time for gaming. You might get more benefit out of SLI for other kinds of workloads though. Some games just outright doesn't support having more than 1gpu. Going by prices, you will be better off spending 930$ on a GTX1080Ti than buying 2 GTX1070s for the same price.