Soundcard / Z170 / SLI?

[Austin_Dish]

Hey guys I'm currently interested about purchasing a sound card for my current setup but unsure if there's a way to accomodate it without sacrificing performance.

My specs are as follows..

MSI XPower Titanium Z170 Motherboard

i7 6700k

SLI 1080 ASUS Strix OC Edition

I'm using a pair of Sennheisers and despite the audio boasting they do regarding this motherboard it's rather disappointing.

I am running the cards in 8x/0/8x/0

I may be misinformed but someone mentioned the possibility of running a soundcard at x1 on a secondary PCIe slot or the motherboard itself can provide support for the soundcard.

Thank you for your time!

 

[pbm86]

What soundcard do you want to buy. Most modern soundcards are using a PCI-E 1x slot. Your motherboard has 3 such slots. But you probably could install one only in 4-th slot above the second videocard. An alternative would be to buy an external card. That may be preferable as it will not be affected by the electromagnetic interference in the case.

 

[Austin_Dish]

I'm looking at getting an ASUS Essence STX II and it looks like it uses PCI Express x1 but my concern is it significantly lowering performance of my SLI 1080s as they're using the 16 lanes provided by the 6700k in 8/0/8/0

My question is can I install this without dropping my gpu sli performance?

 

[pbm86]

The PCI-E x1 slots don't use PCI Express provided by the CPU that are used for GPUs. Those slots are provided by the Z170 chip. There isn't any cause for concern.