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Will 650i bottleneck 9600gt SLI?

A

adithya

Junior Member
Hi everyone my first post here. I am regular reader of AT articles.

I am planning to buy two EVGA 9600GT KO or two MSI NX8800GT. I know that they are PC-E 2 16x cards. I want to know if putting them on a 650i SLI motherboard with dual PCI-E 8x will bottleneck these cards. I want to play crysis at high settings on dx10, vista 64. Cards like 7600GT dont seem to improve in performance when moving from 8x to 16x slots. I want to be sure that my money spent on 9600gt doesnt go waste if i use 650i. I want it to be faster than GeCube 3870X2 atleast. I would also like to know if nx8800gt sli is significantly (>10%) faster than 9600GT KO SLI.
I read in EVGA 780i A1 Edition manual that it requires 1kw for 3 way SLI. Can i run the motherboard + e8200 + 9600GT SLI with corsair 620hx.

I also need help deciding cabinet for this config. Is NZXT Lexa Blackline better or CM 690 or Antec 900? Budget is my main concern. The room temperature is around 100F or 40C during summers and the the room is not ACed. I also want to OC a bit but not much.

I will be grateful if anyone can guide me.
 
Originally posted by: surfsatwerk
They will perform better on a x16 slot. If you're in the market to upgrade EVGA just release their new 750i motherboard.
Click to expand...

According to Nvidia the 750i chipset has 26 PCI-E lanes. Somehow I don't see two slots running at full x16 lanes at the same time working on boards with that chipset. Am I reading it wrong? 😕
 
Well, they advertise 2x16 PCIe 2.0 Slots, NOT lanes. Anyways, the bandwidth of a 16x PCIe 2.0 (8 lane) Slot is the same as a 16x PCIe 1.x (16 lane) slot
 
Originally posted by: adithya
so you guys feel that 9600gt will be slowed by 8x pci-e?
Click to expand...

Now I'm asking someone to come in here and post a dozen links to prove me wrong, but frankly I seriously considered the 9600GT SLI for a long time and from the off the cuff research that I've done that's my opinion.

Now if I already had an 680i mobo I wouldn't have felt the need to upgrade, but since I was building a entirely new system I went with a 7 series chipset.
 
x8 PCIe 2.0 is equivalent to x16 PCIe 1.0. Plenty for a pair of 9600 GTs. Said that, the same nForce 200 chip is used to provide PCIe 2.0 for 780i and 750i, and the NF 200 chip does support up to x32 lanes. So technically it's possible to make the 750i board with x16/x16 configuration. The cut-down of PCIe lanes was probably marketing/yield purpose to begin with. Oh, and under SLI, the SLI connector also plays a role of data exchange.

On the other hand, I did notice performance loss on 975X, by going from full x16 to x8 (PCIe 1.0) on a single HD 3850. So yeah I think the current generation cards are close to maxing out the x16 lanes form PCIe 1.0.
 
and of note - even with 8800GTX SLI there has been little difference in real world or simulated bench marks to show a huge difference in 8x/8x sli vs 16x/16x sli - IIRC the only huge gap in multi GPU PCI-e slot configs was 16x/4x vs 16x/16x on crossfire mobo's

*edit*
after looking around again seems the magic number is 5% difference at best - if you already have a 650i chipset I wouldn't worry about it - i know I love mine and how I can do memory tweaks the intel chipset guys wonder about 🙂
 
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