Need Help on Motherboards, PCI-E 2.0 vs 3.0

[SecretCobraz]

Hey guys I found out that the new Readeon 7970 as well as Nvidia's newer GPUs are going to be supporting PCI-E 3.0, is there any real difference between these?

The two Mobo's I have narrowed it down to are the Asus Maximums IV Extreme-Z
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131760

And the ASRock Fatal1ty Z68 Professional Gen3
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157263



There are a few things I am considering that IU want your opinion on.

With Asus, the nForce Bridge gives me the extra bandwidth to run 2 GPUs at a full X16, X16, making 3-Way SLI/Crossfire possible running at X16, X8, X8. The HAF X will fir the E-ATX Board and I personally like the design and look better.

With ASRock, I have 2 of the 3 PCI-E Slots running at 3.0. There isn't a whole lot more than that to be said.

So the judgment between these 2 boards for me comes down to the performance difference between PCI-E 2.0 vs 3.0. The $70 difference doesn't bother me, but 3-Way SLI/Crossfire is a very real possibility, as i want to upgrade the system as much as possible.

 

[nikorr]

PCI-SIG® Releases PCI Express® 3.0 SPECIFICATION

PCIe® 3.0 specification doubles bandwidth over previous generations

BEAVERTON, Ore. – November 18, 2010 – PCI-SIG®, the organization responsible for the widely adopted PCI Express® (PCIe®) industry-standard input/output (I/O) technology, today announced the availability of the PCIe Base 3.0 specification to its members. The PCIe 3.0 architecture is a low-cost, high-performance I/O technology that includes a new 128b/130b encoding scheme and a data rate of 8 gigatransfers per second (GT/s), doubling the interconnect bandwidth over the PCIe 2.0 specification. PCIe 3.0 technology also maintains backward compatibility with previous PCIe architectures and provides the optimum design point for high-volume platform I/O implementations across a wide range of topologies. Possible topologies include servers, workstations, desktop and mobile personal computers, embedded systems, peripheral devices and more.

"Each new version of the PCIe spec has doubled the bandwidth of the prior generation," said Nathan Brookwood, research fellow at Insight 64. "The latest group of PCIe architects and designers drove the standard forward while maintaining complete backward compatibility for Gen 1 and Gen 2 devices. Rarely has a standard advanced so non-disruptively through three major evolutionary cycles. The ability to pull this off demonstrates not only the ingenuity of the Gen 3 developers, but also the insight of those who defined the earlier versions in such an extensible manner."

The PCIe 3.0 specification extends the data rate to 8 GT/s in a manner compatible with the existing PCIe 1.x and 2.x specifications and products that support 2.5 and 5 GT/s signaling. This bit rate represents the most optimum tradeoff between manufacturability, cost, power, complexity and compatibility. Based on this data rate expansion, it is possible for products designed to the PCIe 3.0 architecture to achieve bandwidth near 1 gigabyte per second (GB/s) in one direction on a single-lane (x1) configuration and scale to an aggregate approaching 32 GB/s on a sixteen-lane (x16) configuration. The new 128b/130b encoding scheme also allows near 100% efficiency, offering a 25% efficiency increase for 8 GT/s as compared to the 8b/10b efficiency of previous versions, which enables the doubled bandwidth.

"The PCI-SIG remains dedicated to I/O innovation and we are proud to release the PCIe 3.0 specification to our members," said Al Yanes, PCI-SIG chairman and president. "The PCIe 3.0 architecture details significant improvements over our two previous PCIe specifications, providing our members with the performance and functionality they need to continue to be innovators in their fields."

This evolutionary specification integrates a number of enhancements to the protocol and software layers of the architecture. These enhancements range in scope from data reuse hints, atomic operations, dynamic power adjustment mechanisms, latency tolerance reporting, loose transaction ordering, I/O page faults, BAR resizing and many more extensions in support of platform energy efficiency, software model flexibility and architectural scalability.

 

[nikorr]

Its an investment for the near future.

PCIe 3.0 architecture to achieve bandwidth near 1 gigabyte per second (GB/s) in one direction on a single-lane (x1) configuration and scale to an aggregate approaching 32 GB/s on a sixteen-lane (x16) configuration.

A lot of technobabble, sure, but one thing's for sure: your next graphics card is bound to murder your current one if paired with a PCIe 3.0 motherboard.

 

[SecretCobraz]

Its an investment for the near future.

PCIe 3.0 architecture to achieve bandwidth near 1 gigabyte per second (GB/s) in one direction on a single-lane (x1) configuration and scale to an aggregate approaching 32 GB/s on a sixteen-lane (x16) configuration.

A lot of technobabble, sure, but one thing's for sure: your next graphics card is bound to murder your current one if paired with a PCIe 3.0 motherboard.

I just found out that Asus is Re-Releasing all of their Republic of Gamer Boards with PCI-E 3.0. A full 32 Lanes of Sweet PCI-E 3 Power.

 

[SecretCobraz]

Best answer selected by SecretCobraz.

 

[nikorr]

Good luck!