Question about PCI-E lanes on a 4790k

[Admiral_Hysteria]

I looked on Intels website and it says the i7 4790k only supports 16 PCI-E lanes. My question is that if I have a sound card and wifi card in my system, would adding a second GPU in SLI not work, because Nvidia cards require 8 lanes each, and my sound and wifi card are using 2?

 

[t3naci0ust]

its 16 PCI-E 3.0 slots

 

[Caesar-rsa]

Okay, your CPU supports 16 PCIe lanes, what this means is that there is 16 lanes that sends and recieves data from the card, but you are seeing it wrong, the motherboard comes with PCIe slots and on the motherboard there will usually be one or two PCIe x16 slots, what means there are two slots that supports 16 lanes , the CPU only supports up to 16 lanes PER slot, so it depends on your motherboard, older motherboards still have PCIe x8 slots, Nvidia requires at least a x8 slot if you want to use the card, but most motherboards will come with PCIe x16 slots. If you want everything to fit, just look for a motherboard that can accomodate all of your requirments. Your CPU will work perfect with a sound card, and two GPUs in SLI, In other words if you want to SLI to GPUs you will have to look for a motherboard with two PCIe x16 slots or two PCIe x8 slots, but thats pretty old. Hope I helped

 

[Pinhedd]

I looked on Intels website and it says the i7 4790k only supports 16 PCI-E lanes. My question is that if I have a sound card and wifi card in my system, would adding a second GPU in SLI not work, because Nvidia cards require 8 lanes each, and my sound and wifi card are using 2?

CPUs that use Intel's LGA-1156, LGA-1155, and LGA-1150 sockets have a single 16x PCIe port on the CPU. This port can be broken into three subports in the following configurations: 16/0/0, 8/8/0, 8/4/4. Each subport can be down negotiated independently, so it's possible to use configurations such as 4/4/4, 4/1/4, and 8/0/1. It is not however possible to connect more than three PCIe devices to this port without using an external switching chip.

Intel's PCH has an additional 8x PCIe 2.0 port which can be broken down into 8 individual 1x ports which enables the use of numerous low-bandwidth peripherals and add-in chips (EDIT: for clarity, onboard devices such as storage controllers, USB controllers, audio, etc... connect through these ports). Most motherboards contain a 4x port and up to three 1x ports. These ports often share bandwidth (on motherboards that contain an M.2 connector, this shares bandwidth as well) which means that the 4x port can operate in either 4x mode or 1x mode. If none of the 1x ports are populated, it will operate in 4x mode, if any of the 1x ports are populated it will operate in 1x mode for a total of four 1x connections to the PCH.

If you connect your sound card and wifi card to the slots that are wired to the 8x port on the PCH the lanes originating from your CPU will be unaffected.