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GTX 970 SLI PCIe scaling

Tags:
  • Gtx
  • Configuration
  • SLI
  • Graphics
Last response: in Graphics & Displays
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September 28, 2014 8:12:16 AM

I'm running a 2500k on a Z68-series MB, which limits me to x8/x8 PCIe 2 SLI. I'd like to upgrade the system to 2 GTX 970's for 4k gaming, but I am concerned that I might be leaving performance on the table due to a PCIe 2 x8 bottleneck. I haven't found any benchmarks showing PCIe lane scaling on the 970/980 GPUs (or any other GPUs in the past 2 years, for that matter). I'd like some hard data (x8 vs x16 PCIe 2 or x4 vs x8 PCIE 3 [yes, I know x4 PCIe 3 is faster than x8 PCIe 2, but it should be close enough for my purposes]; SLI comparisons would be even better to account for any cross-card traffic over PCIe), if anyone knows of a source. Failing that, is there someone here with a pair of 970's who is willing to perform a quick experiment on the topic?

More about : gtx 970 sli pcie scaling

September 28, 2014 8:39:46 AM

8x PCIe Gen2 is more than enough for any graphics card. The only performance difference between Gen2 and 3 is in highly synthetic benchmarks where its basically flushing the entire VRAM and replacing it as quickly as possible.
I wouldnt worry about your PCIe lanes interfereing with performance. If anything your CPU is going to be more of a limiting factor, but even then a 2500k has plenty of grunt (its not like Intel chips have gotten far since Sandy Bridge anyway).
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