Hi guys, As you can see from my sig Iam running a GEN3 board with a 2500K. My question is if I bought a 670 and didn't upgrade to IB thus not enabling PCIE3, would I be losing out? Would the card saturate my bus or would I be looking at something much more powerful than a 670 for that to happen? Thanks.
HardOCP did a nice comparison back in July if you would like to see some in-depth stats: http://www.hardocp.com/article/2012/07/18/pci_express_20_vs_30_gpu_gaming_performance_review/ They concluded that the average difference they saw was under 10%, which was most likely the CPU difference between an Ivy-Bridge and Sandy-Bridge processor. In summary, you'll be fine
Then it poses the question as to why PCIE3 has been issued now then, would a SATAIII card with multiple SSDs test it?
1. To add a feature to sell Z77 motherboards. 2. To prepare for future cards. 3. For PCI-Express SSD Cards. Current Gen are PCI Express 2.0, but they can saturate the PCI Express 2.0 lanes.
That's pretty much why its been done People running raid cards with pcie and 10+ssds for like 2-3gb read/ write anandtech ran a few tests. 10 Samsung 830s 256gb hit around 3gb/sec read write.
Because Intel and it's mobo partners needed to give people a reason to upgrade to ivy from sandy and the z77 chipset other than 'it's a tiny bit faster while using a tiny bit less juice' and trying to bypass the fact it doesn't overclock quite so well.
Another reason was to reduce the number of lanes for the same performance. Instead of having to use an 8x slot, add-in cards can achieve the same bandwidth with a 4x slot. This reduces the number of traces required on the PCB, which in turn creates more PCB space, while saving money. Very little can max out 16x PCI-E 2.0, but when it is surpassed, manufactures don't want to be waiting for another revision. Modern SSDs are prime examples of this, already at the limit of SATA 3
