I haven't seen any S1366 boards out that didn't have at least 2 PCI-E slots. So my question, if someone is performance addicted enough to have SLI or maybe even 3-way SLi, where does he put his sound card? Surely the onboard Realtek won't cut it. Also, do all motherboards come with onboard ethernet (not just LAN) nowadays? Because i'm still rolling with a PCI network card, lol.
Think your find that most of the mobo's today do have a reasonable onboard HD sound chipset and onboard LAN... Your also find that most the board have other pci and pci-e 1x slots, which again usable for 3rd part sound cards.
Doesn't mean it has 2 PCI-E that it automatically takes SLI/Crossfire. PCI-E is replacing the good old PCI... and I won't be surprised is soon all lanes are 16x PCI-E as you can fit any PCI-E cards inside, such as the much smaller PCI-E connector... PCI-E 1x and 2x. I would say go only SLI/Crossfire, if the added video card is really cheap (like about 100$), and you need the performance, for what ever reason. Else SLI/Crossfire, is not worth it as it only gives you a 30-40% boost in performance, and it doesn't add new video card features.
A PCI-E 1x, 2x, 4x, all the way up to 16x fits in any PCI-E slot and will work. PCI-E 16x is essentially PCI-E 1x repeated pin 16x times. So a PCI-E 1x sound card SHOULD work under a PCI-E 16X which you think it's for video cards.
I think he's talking about the cooler on dual-slot cards blocking the spare PCI-E slot if they're too close together, meaning you can only use a sound card or other PCI-E device with a single-slot card in the first slot. Could be wrong, though.
you're also forgetting that there is almost always a single pci-e 1 slot right at the top of a mobo layout, which will never be blocked by a graphics card no matter how many you have.
Oh, that's nice. Excuse my ignorance, i've grown up on AGP so i never thought about plugging anything other than a video card into my video card slot. Yeah that's what i was thinking. But now that Goodbytes informed me about this new compatibility, this is entirely moot. Thanks guys!
