Taking advantage of PCIE 3.0

[MrN1ce9uy]

What would a build consist of to take advantage of PCIE 3.0 right now?

 

[Gam3r01]

You dont really "take advantage" of it.
All PCIe protocols are backwards compatible, and there is no substation performance differences between them with current hardware.

 

[MrN1ce9uy]

You dont really "take advantage" of it.
All PCIe protocols are backwards compatible, and there is no substation performance differences between them with current hardware.

PCI Express 3.0 has up to 8GT/s bus speeds. I would need a motherboard that has a PCIE 3.0 x16 slot and a CPU that supports 8GT/s bus speed to [insert your word of preference here] reach speeds past the 5GT/s limit of PCIE 2.0.. am I right? Am I missing something here?

 

[Gam3r01]

If you have a motherboard and PCIe device (typically GPUs) then yes you can use the full bandwidth.
However, there arent many, if any, devices that saturate the bandwidth on 2.0 in the first place.

 

[MrN1ce9uy]

Would high-res gameplay recording not benefit from the higher bandwidth? During gameplay recording, the data is transferred between the GPU and the CPU via the motherboard bus, and everything involved needs to be able to support 8GT/s bandwidth speed, right?

So.. I believe a Skylake CPU would be needed to get past the 5GT/s bus speed limit of previous gen intel CPUs.

 

[Gam3r01]

You dont need that, as I said graphics cards cant even saturate the 2.0 bandwidth. So you could have a, for example, 3GT/s card on a 5GT lane or a 8GT lane. It wouldnt matter.

 

[MrN1ce9uy]

Ah, I see. So when a GPU claims it is PCIE 3.0 it is completely irrelevant? Do the upcoming generation GPUs not have enough processing power+speed to saturate the 2.0, or 3.0 bandwidth?

Now that I think about it, I do remember using Afterburner and only seeing ~20% utilization of GPU bus bandwidth with my 750 Ti.

 

[Gam3r01]

I cant speak for Pascal or Polaris, but at this moment in time cards cant take advantage of the full bandwidth. (Hence why x8 x8 SLI works).
I wouldnt call it irrelevant, but its not required.

 

[MrN1ce9uy]

Thanks for clearing this up for me.

 

[MrN1ce9uy]

Sorry, but I would like to leave this thread unsolved. I want to know if PASCAL can "saturate" a 5GT/s lane enough that an 8GT/s lane would be beneficial. Actually, I could create another thread in Graphics Cards for that. I forgot I was in the Motherboard forum.