PCIE gen 3 motherboards

William Murphy

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Apr 10, 2012
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I'm going to be upgrading my pc. I'm getting a new power supply, motherboard and CPU. I'm thinking of getting the i5 3570k. To go with it I was looking at a few motherboards:

Gigabyte SKT-1155 Z77-D3H
http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4140#ov

Gigabyte SKT-1155 Z68XP-UD3P
http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3912#ov

AsRock Z77 Extreme4
http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=Z77%20Extreme4&cat=Specifications

They are all pcie gen 3. However the graphics card that I have is the hd 6850 which was not made for pcie 3. Will this pose any problems? I am thinking about getting another one and running it in crossfire. The ud3p and the extreme4 when in crossfire mode run at speeds of 8x 8x but since this is gen 3 will it infact be equivalent to 16x 16x in gen 2? Will this still apply with my gen 2 graphics card? The d3H motherboard runs in 16x and 4x speeds when on crossfire. Would this be fast enough considering that it is also gen 3?

Finally which motherboard would you recommend out of these three. As I have said I am considering using crossfire. Any other recommendations of other motherboards are welcome.
 
No, running a PCIe 2.0 card in a 3.0 slot will not be a problem at all :)

Your thoughts on xFire are correct, and a 6850 doesn't even saturate 8x of PCIe 2.0, so you will have absolutely no bottlenecks due to the PCIe interface.

Since you are going with a 3570K I would absolutely suggest getting a Z77 board, as it will take advantage of some of the features built into the IB chip such as Native USB 3.0, PCIe 3.0, and 1866MHz RAM.

The cheapest MB that I would suggest going with is this one, as it has full xFire capability, and is a solid brand.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130644
 

William Murphy

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If the hd 6850 does not saturate a 8x pcie 2.0 then do you think the gigabyte d3h that I mentioned would be fine as when that board is in crossfire it runs at 16x and 4x gen 3 which would equal a 8x gen 2 pcie.
 

William Murphy

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The one that you linked to does not say anywhere that it is pcie 3. It just says pcie 2. I live in Britain so new egg is not an option.
What benefit is there to getting a pcie gen 3 ready graphics card to getting one like my one which was not made for the third genaration?
 

William Murphy

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You can get pcie gen 3 ready graphics cards. What difference would there be between those cards and the one that I have which was not made for gen 3? I have the hd 6850.
 

William Murphy

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Oh. So my graphics card will be able to take full advantage of pcie gen 3.