All,
I recently purchased 4 EVGA 480 super clocked water cooled cards. When doing my initial
homework I was looking for a board that could do Quad SLI at full 16x my options were the
EVGA X58 Classified 4-Way SLI or the GIGABYTE GA-X58A-UD9 4-Way SLI.
The EVGA SR-2 was not an option do to it not being able to take I7 processors. The main
reason I even looked at gigabyte is because EVGA does not have a formal manual for the EVGA
X58 Classified 4-Way SLI board.
I decided to go with GIGABYTE, when reading there manual I saw the following note.
Note 3) Each PCIEX8 slot shares bandwidth with the corresponding PCIEX16 slot (PCIEX8_1
with PCIEX16_1, PCIEX8_2 with PCIEX 16_2, and PCIEX8_3 with PCIEX16_3). When a PCIEX8 slot
is populated, its corresponding PCIEX 16 slot will operate at up to x8 mode.
I read this and said ok well ill just use the on-board sound and I will be able to have my
video run at 16x inter-slot. Well I got the board and went to do some gaming and guess
what? The on-board sound stinks badly!! I immediately had to buy a new sound card bc my
prior one was a pci slot, I ordered the sb xfi fatality pro pcie. But now one of my slots
runs at 8x bc of note #3 which defeats my whole purpose of the entire build.
My question is does the EVGA X58 Classified 4-Way SLI board have this same chip-set
limitation as the GIGABYTE board?
Also does anyone know how much bandwidth in GB/s that a gtx 480 puts out? not the rate in
which the DDR5 talks to the gpu but the actual data rate that is sent to the pcie bus?
Hopefully me posting this will save someone else the same mistake I made, I need a board
that does not have that chip-set limitation, it may or not even matter, as I have read the
reviews on the differences between 8x and 16x performance, but I like knowing my gear has
the ability to run at full 16x for future growth and also I don't think a sound card or any
card should not down clock the rail to 8x the vendor tells me its a chip-set limitation.
Here are my specs and pics of the build below I will be splitting these up into two loops
shortly they run at 50-60C under load 38-45C idle now. There is a now sound card between
the two slots at the bottom.
Case: COOLER MASTER HAF X RC-942-KKN
Cooling: Koolance 3/8 10mm ID tubing
Processor: Intel Core i7-980X Extreme Edition Gulftown 3.33GHz 6 x 256KB L2 Cache 12MB L3
Cache LGA 1366 130W Six-Core
Memory: Corsair Dominator 12GB SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Triple Channel
Hard Drive: Western Digital 728 GB
Video Cards
4 EVGA Super Clocked GTX 480's in Quad SLI Liquid Cooled
GPU 1-4
Core Clock: 752 MHZ
Shaders: 1504 MHZ
Memory: 1900 MHZ
PCIE Bandwidth 16x/16x/16x/16x
Nvidia Driver: 260.63 Beta
Direct X 11
Resolution: 1920x1200
Monitor: ASUS VW266H 25.5 Inch 2ms Refersh
Sound Card: Creative SB X-FI Fatality Pro
Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit
Mother Board: GIGABYTE GA-X58A-UD9 LGA 1366 Intel X58 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 XL ATX Intel
https://home.comcast.net/~ciscoiptech/pic/sli1.jpg
https://home.comcast.net/~ciscoiptech/pic/sli2.jpg
https://home.comcast.net/~ciscoiptech/pic/sli3.jpg
Also posted at EVGA http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.aspx?high=&m=587684&mpage=1#587684
Thanks!
I recently purchased 4 EVGA 480 super clocked water cooled cards. When doing my initial
homework I was looking for a board that could do Quad SLI at full 16x my options were the
EVGA X58 Classified 4-Way SLI or the GIGABYTE GA-X58A-UD9 4-Way SLI.
The EVGA SR-2 was not an option do to it not being able to take I7 processors. The main
reason I even looked at gigabyte is because EVGA does not have a formal manual for the EVGA
X58 Classified 4-Way SLI board.
I decided to go with GIGABYTE, when reading there manual I saw the following note.
Note 3) Each PCIEX8 slot shares bandwidth with the corresponding PCIEX16 slot (PCIEX8_1
with PCIEX16_1, PCIEX8_2 with PCIEX 16_2, and PCIEX8_3 with PCIEX16_3). When a PCIEX8 slot
is populated, its corresponding PCIEX 16 slot will operate at up to x8 mode.
I read this and said ok well ill just use the on-board sound and I will be able to have my
video run at 16x inter-slot. Well I got the board and went to do some gaming and guess
what? The on-board sound stinks badly!! I immediately had to buy a new sound card bc my
prior one was a pci slot, I ordered the sb xfi fatality pro pcie. But now one of my slots
runs at 8x bc of note #3 which defeats my whole purpose of the entire build.
My question is does the EVGA X58 Classified 4-Way SLI board have this same chip-set
limitation as the GIGABYTE board?
Also does anyone know how much bandwidth in GB/s that a gtx 480 puts out? not the rate in
which the DDR5 talks to the gpu but the actual data rate that is sent to the pcie bus?
Hopefully me posting this will save someone else the same mistake I made, I need a board
that does not have that chip-set limitation, it may or not even matter, as I have read the
reviews on the differences between 8x and 16x performance, but I like knowing my gear has
the ability to run at full 16x for future growth and also I don't think a sound card or any
card should not down clock the rail to 8x the vendor tells me its a chip-set limitation.
Here are my specs and pics of the build below I will be splitting these up into two loops
shortly they run at 50-60C under load 38-45C idle now. There is a now sound card between
the two slots at the bottom.
Case: COOLER MASTER HAF X RC-942-KKN
Cooling: Koolance 3/8 10mm ID tubing
Processor: Intel Core i7-980X Extreme Edition Gulftown 3.33GHz 6 x 256KB L2 Cache 12MB L3
Cache LGA 1366 130W Six-Core
Memory: Corsair Dominator 12GB SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Triple Channel
Hard Drive: Western Digital 728 GB
Video Cards
4 EVGA Super Clocked GTX 480's in Quad SLI Liquid Cooled
GPU 1-4
Core Clock: 752 MHZ
Shaders: 1504 MHZ
Memory: 1900 MHZ
PCIE Bandwidth 16x/16x/16x/16x
Nvidia Driver: 260.63 Beta
Direct X 11
Resolution: 1920x1200
Monitor: ASUS VW266H 25.5 Inch 2ms Refersh
Sound Card: Creative SB X-FI Fatality Pro
Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit
Mother Board: GIGABYTE GA-X58A-UD9 LGA 1366 Intel X58 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 XL ATX Intel
https://home.comcast.net/~ciscoiptech/pic/sli1.jpg
https://home.comcast.net/~ciscoiptech/pic/sli2.jpg
https://home.comcast.net/~ciscoiptech/pic/sli3.jpg
Also posted at EVGA http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.aspx?high=&m=587684&mpage=1#587684
Thanks!