Will Max # of PCI Express Lanes in my CPU bottleneck future upgrades/current GPU?

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I'm in the middle of planning a new build and have discovered that CPU's in fact have a max number of PCIe lanes so now i'm thrown.

I'm getting the Intel® Core™ i5-4690K because its the best that fits my budget and at the moment i'm still deciphering which GPU i'm going to go with but I will most likely be doing SLI/Crossfire in the future, will the CPU's limit on PCIe lanes affect the performance/distribution of bandwidth to my GPUS/other upgrades? Will I have to get a CPU with a higher lane allotment like one of the Core i7's?

Cheers
 
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So really, the number of lanes a CPU supports only affects how many GPUs and other things I can stuff onto my motherboard? and there won't be any effect on the bandwidth/performance as long as I stay within two GPU's and a wifi card on an Z97 setup?

Yep that's about it. One hiccup is that the new M.2 SSDs can also use up a couple of pcie lanes. But if you also stay away from M.2 drives you should be fine.
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I thought so. Can you explain why it affects it?
 
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synphul

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The current 1150 has 16 pcie lanes which is what 2x sli setups need (x8/x8 for nvidia). If you needed to run additional cards like sound or wifi AND sli, then 16 lanes would be an issue. M.2 and sata express also requires some lanes but those are in addition to the 16 lanes provided by the cpu. If you didn't plan to do anything more than 2 way sli (or got a motherboard with a plx chip) you should be ok. Same applies to i5's and 4790k i7's.

Upcoming skylake is supposed to up the lanes to 20.

If you needed to go 3 way sli you'd probably want to look at the x99 platform (2011v3). The i7 5820k supports 28 lanes and the upper end like the 5930k and 5960k support 40 pcie lanes.

It really depends on how much you plan to be doing, are you looking at 3 way or 4 way crossfire/sli?
 
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Nah I dont think I'll ever need to do 3 way in the conceivable future. It is likely I will be installing additional cards like sound and wifi , kind of why I had a hunch this limit would be an issue. It really depends on the motherboard though because if it has good on board 7.1 sound then I will only need the extra Wifi.


 
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i7Baby

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If you can only have say 16 lanes as per Z97 CPUs , then you can only run 2 graphics cards successfully.

But if you had an i7 5820k then you could run 28 lanes - 3 graphics cards. Or i7 5930k or 5960X - 40 lanes (same as my i7 3930K) so 4 graphics cards
 
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Z97 CPUs?... What. I thought Z97 was motherboard terminology. I am getting super confused here. I understand the number of lanes = how many graphics cards you can have. I just don't understand the way the GPU's use the lanes, I think. Because I know if you put a GPU in a 16x it might not use all 16 lanes, right? So.
 
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Oh okay. So really, the number of lanes a CPU supports only affects how many GPUs and other things I can stuff onto my motherboard? and there won't be any effect on the bandwidth/performance as long as I stay within two GPU's and a wifi card on an Z97 setup?
 
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i7Baby

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So really, the number of lanes a CPU supports only affects how many GPUs and other things I can stuff onto my motherboard? and there won't be any effect on the bandwidth/performance as long as I stay within two GPU's and a wifi card on an Z97 setup?

Yep that's about it. One hiccup is that the new M.2 SSDs can also use up a couple of pcie lanes. But if you also stay away from M.2 drives you should be fine.
 
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