Question Sandy Bridge-E and PCIe 3.0 with NVIDIA

[nick_m_m]

Hello.

I have an i7-3930k on a Gigabyte X79-UD3, and I'd like to upgrade my Quadro 2000D (PCIe 2.0) to a GeForce RTX 2060 (PCIe 3.0) for better performance in Adobe.

I found a post by ubercake that mentions "the NVIDIA X79 patch" to enable PCIe 3.0 on SB-E with NVIDIA cards. I think/hope I found the patch, "force-enable-gen3.exe", on their site.

Can anyone tell me if this combination will yield PCIe 3.0 performance? The Gigabyte board is supposed to support it, but CPU-Z lists the interface version only as PCI-E, with no number.

Thanks,
Nick

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

From your motherboard specs page, under "Expansion Slots":

"All PCI Express x16 slots conform to PCI Express 3.0 standard" -- Here

 

[nick_m_m]

Thanks, Phillip.

I'm aware the board is supposed to support PCIe 3, but they also claimed 6x SATA3 ports and that wasn't quite true. Call me a skeptic. Also, it's not just about the motherboard. The question is whether that combination of a very old motherboard and CPU - combined with a very new GPU using an unofficial patch - would give PCIe 3 performance. I doubt many people have been down that rabbit hole. There's also some old, conflicting information about whether SB-E even supported PCIe-3. I think there's enough anecdotal evidence to show that it does, particularly ubercake's post, but even today Intel's spec page for i7-3930k says it supports PCIe 2.0. That's what lead me on this quest.

Thanks,
Nick