GeForce And Radeon On Intel's P67: PCIe Scaling Explored

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Intel’s Sandy Bridge-based processors dramatically advance gaming value by increasing performance at lower prices than LGA 1366-based configurations. But is the platform it sits on worthy of that CPU? We test three slot configurations to find out.

Benchmark Results: F1 2010

Anyone looking for the perfect example of a bandwidth-limited game couldn’t do much better than F1 2010. The GeForce GTX 570 drops performance by a whopping 18% in PCIe x4 mode, while the Radeon HD 6950 loses an even more astounding 38% in the same switch.

Even at the GPU-bottlenecked 2560x1600 resolution, a x4 slot hurts the AMD card’s performance by around 20%. The Nvidia sample shortens the gap to a still-significant 10%.

Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom is a Senior Staff Editor at Tom's Hardware US. He tests and reviews cases, cooling, memory and motherboards.