Hardware Lynnfield PCI-Express Gaming Performance

This comment highlights and interesting limitation of Lynnfield processors. When you make an update to the PCI-E spec, you have to update your processor to take advantage, whereas Bloomfield owners would only have to change the motherboard.

 

What is the reason for benching at only 1680x1050 (with no FSAA in Crysis and Stalker CS) ?

 

True. However, chances are they'll incorporate PCI-E 3.0 on a different socket, facilitating a complete platform shift anyway.

 

LOTS of people do. And common P45 boards are DDR2, not DDR3. I could count the people on our forum who have DDR2 X38/X48 boards on 1 hand.

Time! We picked the most common resolution and no FSAA because it meant more stress on the PCI-Express bus because the GPU was doing less weight of the work.

 

As has been pointed out, this article (as much as I enjoyed it), really needs a DDR3 X48/X38 board running a single and multi GPU setup.

The results are biased in how much better Bloomfield and Lynnfield peform when they both have DDR3, whereas P45 is only using DDR2.

Owning a Rampage Extreme, the results don't really tell me how much better i5/i7 really are than what I have now.

 

lol poor bindi. People are never happy no matter what you do XD

 

People have a right to ask! At least it means it's being read!!

 

You are in much the minority I'm afraid A very large quantity of the market that bought X48s have already upgraded to Bloomfield. We don't even have an X48 board anymore.

 

Suckage

 

Yeah, but when you're specifically testing multi-GPU setups, wouldn't it make sense to choose the chipset that is designed for it?
Choosing a P45 for CrossFireX is silly unless you're running a card that won't saturate 8 PCIe lanes (which would make CFX pointless anyway).
That's Lynnfield's Achilles heel anyway, everyone knows that.

For multi-GPU X58>X48>P55/P45 (talking only electrical PCIe performance)

 

No, we chose a platform that is relevant to what people actually bought. Otherwise I might have included nForce 790i Ultra SLI too for the six people on the planet that own one of those

Previously people were more than happy with two x8s and the common consensus was that the bus was never flooded anyway so don't bother paying for expensive X48 boards when £100 P45s would do.

It's easy to say with hindsight that X58 is better, but for those who purchased before X58 - how much better is good to justify.

 

Nice article. I owned a P45 board for crossfire and was more than happy with it. Although my next board will probably be x16/x16.

There is an old article here http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pci-express-2.0,1915-11.html but it shows that there is neglible difference operating at x16 in comparison to x8 when it comes to PCIE 2.0 (as was stated earlier).

 

Should have picked the resolution most people with an SLI/Crossfire setup would be using (1920x1200). But still interesting results.... I wonder if 8x will be enough for a 150GB/s+ 5870?

 

Nice review, although it would've been nice if you used higher clockspeeds to further eliminate any potential CPU bottlenecks, especially in multi-GPU. I'm also surprised you guys kinda stumbled on the x8 vs. x16 bandwidth results, most other sites and forums were keenly interested in the potential difference there between P55 and X58, although few did a dedicated comparison as you did here. I think only THG did a dedicated thorough comparison on launch day:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i5-gaming,2403-9.html

It does look like X58 is the more "future proof" platform for multi-GPU users, especially with 58x0 and GT300 looming on the horizon.

 

"old article" being the operative term there, those parts are 2 generations old and about half as fast as the current single fastest GPU. The next-gen looks to continue to obey Moore's law with the next-gen single-GPU approximating current multi-GPU performance, so x8 will become an even greater bottleneck.

Also, THG has since published at least two follow-ups to that article, one with the 4870 and 4870X2 which i can't find atm, and this one with P55 and X58.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i5-gaming,2403-9.html

 

Fair enough. /bows

Yeah, but as the newer cards start saturating the lanes, even if it's less than 16, it may be more than 8, P45/55 benches lose relevance.

 

What is the speed of AM3 PCI lanes in crossfire? Do the drop down to 8X?

 

What if you overclock both the PCI express frequency and the QPI frequency on the P55??? Would that bring it up to X58 levels?

 

AM3 is a socket. The 790FX chipset (AMD's current flagship) has 16x + 16x electrical, with a third at 4x or 8x, I can't remember. Basically a total of 42 PCIe lanes for all I/O

Perhaps, but AT seems to suggest that overclocking them is, in fact, the hard part.

 

On a 790X/GX chispet it's x8/x8 For 790FX it's 16x/16x or 8x/8x/8x/8x for the quad crossfire MSI