Mother board question for new build

[luctantem]

I'm newbie and decide to build system myself for the 1st time, I'm less aware of hardware terminology , So I hope friends here will help me!

ASUS P8Z77-V PREMIUM VS Gigabyte Intel Z77 Dual Thunderbolt ATX Motherboard

The problem is that Z77 motherboards are limited to just 16 PCIe lanes.

The ASUS board gets around this with a chip set that does some switching. This allows you to get x16 on 2 PCIe slots.


On the Gigabyte if you install the 2 GPUs the PCIe busses drop to x8.

I want someone to explain above 3 lines in detail...I cant understed terms and their meaning, I got this reply in other forum for building new machine, I can ask there itself but I just thought I wud ask here as its a specific hardware, motherboard forum.

Thnx

 

[SpeedTester]

Welcome to the forums Luctantem,

I'm pretty sure that if you run two cards the board will drop down to 8/8

What are your planned system specs?

 

[luctantem]

Welcome to the forums Luctantem,

I'm pretty sure that if you run two cards the board will drop down to 8/8

What are your planned system specs?

and can you plz explain advantage of dual x16 pcie ?

I'm thinking on:

Intel Core i7-3770K Quad-Core Processor 3.5 GHz

Asus P8Z77-V PREMIUM

EVGA GeForce GTX670 FTW+ 4096MB GDDR5

32GB RAM

 

[Cerb]

and can you plz explain advantage of dual x16 pcie ?

A PCI-e 4x, 8x, or 16x card cannot physically fit into a PCI-e 1x slot.
A PCI-e 8x or 16x card cannot physically fit into a PCI-e 4x slot.
A PCI-e 16x card cannot physically fit into a PCI-e 8x slot.

A PCI-e 8x card can fit in a 8x or 16x slot.
A PCI-e 4x card can fit in a 4x, 8x, or 16x slot.
A PCI-e 1x card can fit in a 1x, 4x, 8x, or 16x slot.

Any PCI-e card can use up to its rated count in lanes. So, an 8x card in a physical 16x-size slot that is operating electrically as a 4x slot works like a 4x card in a 4x slot.

By making the slots sized as 16x, you can use any PCI-e card in them. If you use a single PCI-e 16x video card, it really doesn't matter either way, to you. However, it has thus far avoided the frustration of several different-performing and often-incompatible slots, like we had with PCI (5V, 3.3V; 33MHz, 66MHz, 133MHz; 32-bit, 64-bit; bus-mastering, non-busmastering).

 

[cmdrdredd]

I'm newbie and decide to build system myself for the 1st time, I'm less aware of hardware terminology , So I hope friends here will help me!

ASUS P8Z77-V PREMIUM VS Gigabyte Intel Z77 Dual Thunderbolt ATX Motherboard

The problem is that Z77 motherboards are limited to just 16 PCIe lanes.

The ASUS board gets around this with a chip set that does some switching. This allows you to get x16 on 2 PCIe slots.


On the Gigabyte if you install the 2 GPUs the PCIe busses drop to x8.

I want someone to explain above 3 lines in detail...I cant understed terms and their meaning, I got this reply in other forum for building new machine, I can ask there itself but I just thought I wud ask here as its a specific hardware, motherboard forum.

Thnx

On the Z77 platform the PCIe lanes are inside the CPU. When running a single GPU you can have PCIe 3.0 @ 16x. Two would give PCIe 3.0 @ 8x/8x which is equivalent to PCIe 2.0 @ 16x/16x. Some motherboards added additional lanes via a bridge chip on the motherboard. So you could do PCIe 3.0 16x/16x but the chip ads a bit of latency. Performance may be affected in some extreme cases by a very small margin. The latency when running off the CPU lanes is extremely low.

So basically what I mean to say is if your motherboard is giving you PCIe 3.0 @ 8x/8x when you run SLI or Crossfire you don't need to worry about the bandwidth available. Not even a GTX Titan completely saturates the bus at these speeds.