PCI Express And SLI Scaling: How Many Lanes Do You Need?

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Are the most elaborate platforms really required to host the fastest GPUs, or can you get away with P55's lane-splitting scheme? As Nvidia’s latest graphics processors push 3D performance to new heights, we examine the interfaces needed to support them.

PCIe Scaling: 3DMark Vantage

3DMark does a great job of testing GPU and CPU performance, but we’re not yet certain how relevant its results will be in a bandwidth comparison.

The PCIe 2.0 x8 slot performs only around 1% slower than a 16-lane slot at the benchmark’s 1280x1024 “Performance” preset, while the x4 slot drops behind by another 3%.

The performance difference between x16 and x4 slots narrows to 2% at 3DMark’s 1920x1200 “Extreme” preset.

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.