Sorry if this has a thread already, I rooted around and couldn't find one. There's been suspiciously little talk about this new standard. I'm probably going to buy a mobo that supports it just in case it's the next big step, but will it be? All the new nVidia's support it, but they'll work fine without, so why bother? How much performance gain will it offer? Has anyone run any benchmarks? Are bit-tech going to do an assessment? In short, PCI-e 2.0: wtf?
At current moment, the performance gain is nothing, because current cards can't even use the bandwidth of PCI-E 1.1 X16 slots. It is an upgrade that isn't worth dropping a lot of money on, because it will probably take while before anything can actually use its additional bandwidth.
i think i know where boiled elephant is coming from with this, because although pcie 2.0 is not needed for now but what in 6-12 months time nvidia release a super dooper graphics card that needs pcie 2.0 then you will have to buy a new mobo just to get the best from it, so at the moment does it make sense to buy a new mobo now that does not support pcie 2.0
Only difference between PCI-e 2.0 and PCI-e 1.1 standards is that the new one can deliver twice the power across the slot and requires that both slots be capable of full 16x bandwidth for SLI operations. Current cards don't even saturate 8x bandwidth and can still pull the extra power directly from the PSU; so there's currently no real advantage too upgrading to a new board just for PCI-e 2.0
i agree there is no point in upgrading to pcie 2.0 but if like me your in the market for a new motherboard then i think it makes sense to give it some thought now
you know ATI's next flagship card will be a 3870x2 (or some other name) card with 2 GPU's. will that saturate PCIe 1.1?? since i want to buy the new top card when they come out, need to know whether to upgrade mobo or not....... also, will there ever be a P45?
P45? Depends if you lose your job. PCI-E 2 offers twice the power and twice the bandwidth per lane, but even though it's "supported" it's just an incremental update atm.
rumors of the p45 here http://www.custompc.co.uk/news/6017...to_introduce_p45_chipset_in_january_2008.html
Uhhhh.. OK. 1280 Stream processors - 4x that of the HD3870? I find it hard to believe that Intel will be advertising such a thing on official documents, unless it feels super-threatened by Nvidia. Most of the CPUs will be 1333 and P45 will be mainstream so if you want 1600 I'd hazard a guess you'll have to buy a better chipset - X48s replacement. But then you think - why do I want to buy P45 then??
PCIe 2.0 native support (been reading the PCIe 2.0 thread over on abit offical forums, seems some people have compatibility problem with the x16 slot, but x4 slot worked fine, strangely enough) and 1600FSB support, if most processors are 1333FSB, there's no point going from P35 then
my gut feeling is the p45 ain't worth upgrading to because it felt like a halfway house... also no need to upgrade to PCIx 2.0, by the time there's a card that "Actually" takes advantage of the extra bandwidth, we'll all be dancing in reasonably priced DDR3-1600. don't get me wrong that there will not be a 2.0 card... vga with pcix 2.0 will be out soon enough, but... it will be a marketing and PR event by keeping the maker's brand in the news cycle... i'm not falling for that crap
