What's a pcie 3.0 controller?

[freshbuilder]

Okay I'm a noob and read this article http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/printpage/AMD-Radeon-HD-7970-Video-Card-Review/1458. Says here that only the i7-3960x has a pcie 3.0 controller, does that mean that if I use a mobo with a 3.0 slot with a gpu that needs that slot but my processor is an i5 2500k it would mean that I wouldn't get the best performance out of it?

 

[Pyree]

i5-2500k will not give you PCIe 3.0. But I don't think your PCIe 2.0 16 lane will be a bottleneck.

 

[shanky887614]

actually the reason they say about the pci-e 3.0


is bassically all the motherboards that have pci-e 3.0 support ivy bridge cpu's


ivy bridge uses the same slot as sandy bridge but not all motherboards will support the new cpu's


most if not all the ones with pci-e 3.0 should support it. if i had know before i bought motherboard about this i would have paid more money to get one with pci-e 3.0

 

[jaguarskx]

A PCI-e 3.0 card will work fine in a PCI-e 2.0 slot. The PCI-e 3.0 standard basically doubles the bandwidth available compared to the PCI-e 2.0 standard. Not sure if it also increases the watts provided by the PCI-e slot.

Anywaste, a single PCI-e 3.0 card should not be bottlenecked by a PCI-e 2.0 slot for some time to come. The PCI-e 1.0 standard came out in 2004 during the era of the Radeon X800. It probably wasn't until the release of Radeon HD 5950 which was released in 2010 that PCI-e 1.0 showed any issues of bottlenecking. I'm not even positive if the Radeon HD 5950 was bottlenecked by PCI-e 1.0.

 

[freshbuilder]

So no need to get an ivy bridge? my motherboard has 3.0 slots, its an asrock extreme 7 gen 3

 

[jaguarskx]

No need to immediately get a mobo with a PCI-e 3.0 slot if your current mobo has a PCI-e 2.0 slot. So if you are going to buy a PCI-e 3.0 card soon, all you need to do is simply install it.

It should be at least a few years if not more before you have to worry about a PCI-e 2.0 slot limiting a PCI-e 3.0 card.

 

[mathew7]

Physically the slots by themself are identical between PCIe 1.0 2.0 and 3.0.
The CPU provides 16 lanes of PCIe, which a MB could have wired to a single x16 slot or to 2 x16 slots (I'm talking physical slot, not electrical). In the latter case (2 x16), 8 lanes are connected straight to the 1st slot while the other 8 go to some switching chips to "duplicate" them to both slots (1st- lanes 9-16, 2nd- lanes 1-8). The chip will detect wether the 2nd slot is populated and route the signals to only one slot.
What they say with the "gen 3" and "PCIe 3.0" support is that the traces of the signals and the switching chips have been tested and certified for PCIe 3.0. A non-gen3 MB could have too much electrical noise to be able to pass PCIe 3.0 frequencies/signal.
So with a SandyBridge CPU, you will not have ANY 3.0 capabilities. With an IvyBridge CPU you will have 1 x16 or 2 x8 PCIe 3.0 capable slots (which currently only the Radeon 79x0 can use). All other slots are still 2.0 and are connected to the MB chip.

PS: the MB-to-card connections will always use the common capabilities. So a 2.0 MB will work with a 3.0 GPU, but the latter will use the common 2.0.

 

[freshbuilder]

So let me get this straight, let me know if I got something wrong. My mobo already has pcie 3.0 slots, but I won't have any 3.0 capabilities since I'm using a Sandy bridge processor.

Is the performance difference that I'm going to get from a 3.0 slot with a cpu that has a pcie 3.0 control unit significant enough to warrant an upgrade?

When the successor of the Ivy bridge comes out, will that still be compatible with my mobo? I'm assuming the one after the Ivy bridge would be able to use 3.0.

 

[jacksena]

It is the next generation of LGA1155 processors will feature PCI-Express 3.0 bus to connect with graphics cards, and provide double bandwidth over PCI- Express 2.0.

 

[freshbuilder]

Best answer selected by freshbuilder.

 

[bichedeflex]

sorry to bother later on that subject , i have a vega 56 that works on pcie2.0 16x port (4x )
but doesnt on anything pcie 3.0, any idea why ? is there some controllers in the card responding to activate 3.0 ?

 

[USAFRet]

sorry to bother later on that subject , i have a vega 56 that works on pcie2.0 16x port (4x )
but doesnt on anything pcie 3.0, any idea why ? is there some controllers in the card responding to activate 3.0 ?

Please start a new thread for your particular situation.
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