z97 vs z87 boards with 3 way cross fire...

[OniNoKen]

As I continue to try to put together a new computer, I've found my self stymied by information. I'm building a rig to play flight sims/fps's at 7680 x 1440, across three monitors. I was hoping to do this via a 3 way crossfire array of r9 290x's.

Right now, I'm torn between a couple of boards with z97 chipsets that have features I'm really excited about, and would provide 8/4/4 lanes of gen 3 pci-e for the GPU's, and a plx'ed board that would give me 8/16/8, but is more geared towards overclocking than gaming. Assuming I'll do what's necessary to run those cards at a reasonable temp, including water cooling, will the z97's bottleneck the GPU's? I've read that a gen 3 4 lane is good enough for any graphics card, but the articles that stated that weren't written within the last couple of months.

If anyone has experience with a late model card in a similar setup, I'd love your feedback..

Thanks for your time.

 

[Karsten75]

If you think of overclocking as "extreme gaming" then you will realize that the PLX boards are the right way to go.

That or look at having a LGA-2011 setup with a Haswell-E or IVB-E CPU. on the LGA 2011 boards there are more native PCIe lanes.

 

[Newbbuilder11]

More than likely the new boards would suit your r9 290x's, seeing as they run 3.0 and your cards are 3.0 pcie it will be fine, just as long as you have a beefy PSU and a great CPU as well.