Tom's Hardware > Forum > Motherboards & Memory > General Motherboard > Why do some MB have 2 or more PCI-E Slot?

Why do some MB have 2 or more PCI-E Slot?

Forum Motherboards & Memory : General Motherboard - Why do some MB have 2 or more PCI-E Slot?

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ableslayerdg   06-23-2009 at 05:27:41 AM

ASUS Rampage Formula has 2 x PCIe x1 Expansion Slots. I wonder why you have 2 slots since you can only use one in my knowledge.

Unless you have dual monitors? one video card for one monitor? is that it? or you can use both on the same monitor and have 2x the power of two video card in one application. please educate me. thanks!

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g3force   06-23-2009 at 06:02:06 AM
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ableslayerdg wrote :

ASUS Rampage Formula has 2 x PCIe x1 Expansion Slots. I wonder why you have 2 slots since you can only use one in my knowledge.

Unless you have dual monitors? one video card for one monitor? is that it? or you can use both on the same monitor and have 2x the power of two video card in one application. please educate me. thanks!


Some motherboards have two PCI-E slots mainly to take advantage of Crossfire or SLI, which pairs up two similar GPUs together to give a boost in performance.
Heres a link explaining ATI's Crossfire. Nvidia's counterpart is called SLI. (Note that SLI originally stood for Scan-Line Interleave, which was a technology made by 3dfx's Voodoo line to boost performance by linking two cards). Remember that SLI only works on a motherboard that supports SLI, and likewise Crossfire only works on a motherboard that supports Crossfire. For example, Crossfire is supported by the ASUS Rampage formula motherboard, but SLI isn't.

Under TH's graphics charts section, you can find several benchmarks showing the results of dual card vs. single card configurations. Note that SLI and Crossfire scale better at higher resolutions, and sometimes loses performance against single cards at lower resolutions.

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ableslayerdg   06-23-2009 at 06:53:48 AM
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this is as far a the best knowledge i've got since the birth of video game cards. thank you so much.

so if you have a motherboard with SLI or Xfire enabled, you can pair up 2 or more Video cards to act as one video card to boost the game gfx intensity? wow. im so leaving on rocks. i thought having a Ati Radeon 4850 will do the trick on assassin's creed and crysis warhead.

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zipzoomflyhigh   06-23-2009 at 04:56:58 PM
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Its for 2 video cards, and no you dont need two video cards for 2 monitors.

------------------------------ P965/Q6700@3.2 8MB HD4850 OC Edition
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