MSI HAWK GTX 460 and x8 lane

[plum]

Not sure if this is the right section for it but I guess it's related. Basically I'm buying a i5 760 with a msi hawk gtx 460 and the mobo would be the GA-P55A-UD3 (http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3242#ov).

As that is a p55 board, if I decide to use SATA3, the x16 lane gets cut into half making it x8. Now I did read the recent review that was published where the GTX 480 managed to lose about 8% in general from running the card in x8. What I'm curious about is how saturation scales between a 480 and my 460 so I could roughly determinate (unless you can tell me, if anyone has tested this before) how much of a performance decrease I'd get. If at all. This is important to me because I will decide over this whether I want to run my hard drive in SATA2 or SATA3. So far, I judge 8% to be a lot because I mostly care about performance in games and not how fast Photoshop will launch but of course that would be a good plus if the performance decrease is lower.

 

[Timop]

Run your hard-drive in SATA2, SATA3 does not improve your performance what-so-ever, unless you're using SSDs. HDDs barely use up 150MB/s, far shy of the 300MB/s limit of SATA2.

 

[plum]

Oh I see, thanks for clearing that up. In that case I'll save up and get a SSD to boot my OS then. It's just good to know that there would be no performance loss, pretty much means I can use up SATA3 and USB3 at full potential while keeping my GPU at full potential as well. This is great.

 

[plum]

Best answer selected by plum.

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey