9800GTX and PCI-E 2.0

[zerogear]

I'm curious, as since the card will be in PCI-E 2.0, and it will be backward compatible with PCI-E 1.1, would the bandwidth of 9800GTX (purely speculative) saturate PCI-E 1.1 @ 16x?

 

[Polish3d]

Who knows

 

[zerogear]

Haha, well. I guess, but it would suck if I had to upgrade my motherboard/cpu just to use 9800GTX

 

[Piuc2020]

Like Frackal said: Who knows.

If I have to take a wild guess, I'll say that its 100% (yeah not 99% not covering my ass here) sure that PCI-E 1 bandwidth's will be MORE than enough to drive a 9800GTX.

Heck, the AGP bus was capable of driving a X1950XT and it is probably still enough for a 8800 card... the whole transition from AGP to PCI-E was not really needed, and the PCI-E 2.0 will just be a fancy number on your motherboard spec sheet because it will not bring any benefits anytime soon.

 

[bryanW1995]

hey, they need to cover those people who build their own computers and don't like to replace the mobo more than once every ten years but upgrade all other parts every 18 mos or so. that is a HUGE market... right? anyone?

 

[JAG87]

pci-e 16x has a bandwith of 8000 MB/s, i doubt it will be a bottleneck.

you can run an 8800 GTX with pci-8x and there is almost no difference in performance, which shows that we are not even half way there with saturation.

4x pci-e on the other hand will cripple it, so we're between 2000 and 4000 MB/s of bandwith with current gen. even if the 9800 GTX requires twice that much, were still safe.

 

[Noema]

Originally posted by: JAG87
pci-e 16x has a bandwith of 8000 MB/s, i doubt it will be a bottleneck.

you can run an 8800 GTX with pci-8x and there is almost no difference in performance, which shows that we are not even half way there with saturation.

Heck, you can run 2x8800GTX on PCI-E 8X and there's barely any performance difference.