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

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PCIe Scaling: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call Of Pripyat

The latest S.T.A.L.K.E.R. sequel is bandwidth-friendly, with the x8 and x4 slot configurations falling only 6% and 1% behind full 16-lane transfers at the game's lowest resolution.

Increasing resolution shifts the load further away from CPU and PCIe performance, dropping the difference between x16 and x4 to only 3%. A x8 slot offers a performance level within 1% of the x16 slot at 2560x1600.

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

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80 Comments Comment from the forums

Mousemonkey

There are quite a few folk who have been waiting for this.
Reply
zorky9

This would even add more value to the i5-750 in your best CPU for the money article.
Reply
amk09

I love how people always bash on x8 x8 and how it sucks, when in reality x16 x16 is only 4% better.

You spend unnecessary $$$ on a x58 platform while I save money that I can put towards a GPU upgrade with my p55 platform :)
Reply
carlhenry

i'm curious how other games are "dependent" on bandwidth while others are not... does that mean that the games that aren't dependent on bandwidth isn't using the full potential given the the size advantage of x16 over the x8? i wish every game would utilize every inch of your hardware in the future.
Reply
sambadagio

For all your fps hunters, I bet you only have a screen at home with 50 or 60Hz. So just for your information, everything above 50 or 60fps is just useless... In this aspect, a PCIx 4x is actually enough... ;-)

Reply
luke904

so a 4850 crossfire setup will hardly be bottlenecked by an 8 lane motherboard.

anyone know if 4850's are going to be unavailable any time soon? You could get the 3000 series for quite awhile after the 4000's released so I'm crossing my fingers until i can afford a cpu upgrade and another 4850

cpu is currently a 7750BE and so im pretty sure it would bottleneck the 4850's. I think it does with just one actually.
Reply
jgv115

@ carlhenry

It's not the game's fault. The GPU can only go as fast as it was made to go. So in simple terms you could say that GPUs these days aren't "fast" enough to use all the bandwidth PCI Express offers.
Reply
outlw6669

Very nice review but I have to ask, why did you not test with 5970's?

On a card for card basis they are still quite a bit more powerful than the GTX 480 and should require the most bandwidth of any current card for maximum performance.
Reply
barmaley

This review tells me that if you already have an i7 and at least 2xPCIe 16x lanes on your motherboard then in order to play modern games, all you are going to be upgrading for the next several years is your graphics.
Reply
Aionism

Even though I'm not interested in SLI I am glad to finally see a benchmark comparing PCI-E x16 and x4. My motherboard only allows me to use my video card in my x4 slot for some reason. I've been wondering how much performance I've been losing over that.
Reply