Thanks jaquith.
So, it's pretty clear to everyone I've talked to about PCIe 3 that it's pretty much useless for gamers in regards to GPU's at least for now. However, where is the benefit to PCIe 3 then?
It's weird to me that AMD chose to make the 79xx GPU's with PCIe 3 support for no apparent reason since 1. there's no benefit and 2. AMD still has not come out with a single motherboard or CPU with PCIe 3 support. AMD has never even mentioned them.
My understanding is that everything in the chain must all be PCIe 3 in order to get 'true' PCIe 3 support or, it can only be as good as the weakest link in that chain i.e. mobo, chipset, CPU, GPU etc. So, who would really benefit from PCIe 3 then? What type of work would benefit best from PCIe 3?
I'd really like to see Tom's do an article on PCIe 3 to explain what it's really used for. Gamers don't seem to understand that PCIe 3 is not really about them. Some of us have work to do - I use Adobe CS, photoshop, and loads of stuff for my business almost every day - would that benefit from PCIe 3 or no?
[citation][nom]jaquith[/nom]1. Not much better, I decided not to mothball my 980X and instead to only replace my GPU's with GTX 600 series when available and then with 3GB vRAM.2. Not much with clock-to-clock comparison; e.g. 4.5GHz to 4.5GHz. Sure the SB/SB-E is slightly faster but in most resolutions none of them really impede or bottleneck.3. (link) well it seems I was right PCIe 2.x versus PCIe 3.x ->
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/for [...] ew-21.html the GPU's cannot saturate x8 PCIe 2.x so it will be quite a while if not years before PCIe 3.x gains ground to make it useful.[/citation]