PCI express 3.0 Graphics Cards vs PCI express 2.0 Graphics Cards

I'm in the same boat...
IMHO - 3.0 is the future - new drivers are on the way.
2.0 is being phased out.

PCI-e 3.0 means precisely zero for performance right now.

Future graphics cards will probably benefit from it, though.

performance wise, there is no difference, yes even expensive cards cannot saturate version 2.
in the future yes, but another question is when, and will you be buying those $600 cards that may saturate the bandwidth (in the future).
just an example, my board supports ver3 but im still on sandy bridge, i'm using gtx 670 which is fast. but i don't care about 2 vs 3 right now because the road is just too wide, maybe if you are on 3-way sli or something.

high cannot maximize it, let alone low end ones.

I bet that when the 2014/2015 line of cards comes out, there may begin to be noticeable performance improvement on PCI-e 3.0.

But it's worth noting that PCI-e 1.0 can still handle pretty much any card out there just fine and that's a very old spec (or I suppose technically that's PCI-e 1.1? I forget).

PCI-E is just like putting SATA 3(6gigabit) on a hard drive. The chips are out so they use it. Sounds great on the specs, but does nothing.

Unless you are looking at some of the dual cards(HD7990 GTX690. and even then the hit may not even be noticeable), you are not using all of the 2.0 bandwidth at all.

The only thing that is GOOD about the PCI-E 3.0 cards is many are newer with smaller more power friendly cores  . Just like how second gen i7 takes less power then first gen i7. Third takes even less  

Got a GTX 650 ti(on my 2.0 board) in my media center and the power draw is GREAT for what it is.

Are you all hinting that it's misleading to sell lower end graphics cards as genuine "PCI Express 3.0 graphics cards" since there is no actual benefit?

Note: Are you sure there is not a card that can use the pci express 3.0 as a benefit over other cards without pci express capability?

It's just marketing but even the 690 only gets like a 1-2% performance benefit to being in a PCI-e 3.0 slot over PCI-e 2.0.

wonder what would happen to the performance of SSD's from one slot to the other? pci-e is not just limited to video cards.

Ohh yes, SSD's will eat as much bandwidth as we can give them. They just need more channels on the controller if they are not maxing it.

They say, get Ivy Bridge 3rd Gen processors to access PCI Express 3.0.
They say, get this graphics card because it uses PCI Express 3.0 as opposed to other graphics cards that use PCI Express 2.0.
They say, don't worry PCI express 3.0 is downward compatible.

Here is what I would like to know:

Granted the Nvidia GT 640 is a PCI Express 3.0 graphics card and only an example, and as opposed to other grphics cards that use PCI Express 2.0.

( 1 ) How does a Nvidia GT 640 perform on a PCI Express 3.0 with an Ivy Bridge 3rd Gen Processor?

( 2 ) How does a Nvidia GT 640 perform on a PCI Express 2.0 with an Ivy Bridge 3rd Gen Processor?

( 3 ) How does a Nvidia GT 640 perform on a PCI Express 2.0 with a Sandy Bridge Processor?


How do all three benchmarks compare? Isn't this where the benefit would be?

Gt 640 will perform same with all setups.

If this is the case, I might have done better with the same budget going Sandybridge all the way (processor/mobo). In all honesty, as I clicked the confirm button to purchase this rig, the press release for LGA1155 's replacement LGA1150/Haswell/Lynx Point chipset was released (hahaha no...).

Budget Build (No OC):

ASRock B75M-DGS LGA 1155 Intel B75 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard
Intel Core i3-3220 Processor (3M Cache, 3.30 GHz)
1 x G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 8GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) Model F3-10666CL9S-8GBXL
Rosewill LINE-M Micro-ATX Mini Tower Dual USB 3.0
Asus 24x DVDRW/ 48x CDRW OEM
Antec EarthWatts Green 500w 80+
Windows 8 Pro (You can make it look very close to Windows 7 so I heard)

Why? Is there evidence?

The card will perform as fast on ANY slot because it is not that fast. A 3rd gen CPU will be faster only if the game can use the extra cpu power(this varies with games).

The GT 640 is honestly a lower end card that will NEVER be bandwidth limited with PCI-E 2.0 even at x8 i would not be surprised if it still performed the same.

I can test a 5770 @ x16 and x8 on 2.0 and since that IS faster, it would tell you what you want to know.

Your call if you want that info(benchmarks).

Ok, cool. Thanks.



A processor type has nothing to do with the performance of a graphics card that is labeled PCI Express 3.0, with current gpu's, am I correct?

Some games have much more use for the processor them the video card. With this kind of game. The cpu becomes the bottleneck. Flight Simulator comes to mind. Many cards perform almost the same because the cpu can not actually keep up. A faster cpu on this kind of game will always give you more performance(to to a certain point).

Now other games use the video card so hard that it maxes out before the cpu. This is a video card bottleneck. With this kind of game, even a faster cpu does not improve performance much because no matter how fast the cpu can feed the video card data, it just can not keep up.

I will get you some benchmarks of a mid end card(5770 @ X8 and X 16,) both 2.0 because that is a 2.0 card, but being faster(and has MUCH more memory bandwidth) then a GT640, it should give you an idea.

In the meantime, check this out. Note they are using SB and IB cpu's(and VERY high end video cards) and say them selves that some games may be getting a slight boost from the IB cpus newer architecture.
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2012/07/18/pci_express_2...

All in all the performance is VERY close and this card is FASTER then a GT640 on a 2.0 slot. As you see, 3.0 is just not needed in low/mid and even has a small effect on high end card. As new high end cards come out, they will be able to use the extra bandwidth.

PCI-E 2.0 x16

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PCI-E 2.0 X8

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alright nuke, good stuff. Can you look at the original question and sum it all up in one comment so I can choose yours as the best answer and close this thread, or should I keep it open to let other people comment.

That is up to you if you want to leave it open a bit longer.

You can pick what ever answer helped you the most here. It does not have to be mine if someone else got the point across better. The best answer will show under your first post to help others in the future.

The short answer would just be that PCI-E 3.0 cards even higher end ones do not yet need the extra bandwidth(It is more then fine and even 1.0/1.1 would be enough for a GT 640), but will in the future. Mid end cards will take a bit longer to need that kind of bandwidth.