2011 And Still Sharing Lanes?

[Delavan]

The Sabertooth P67 is 8x/8x...

Like Dan mentioned, and with the power consuption graphs, it's clear that with the low power draw of Sandy, a dual GPU config (full system power draw) will draw less than i7 9** setups...it's good for the 750 watts to 850 watts PSU owners, they'll have more "overhead", the PSUs won't be as loaded...it's a "little" detail, but still it's positive!

[Sagath]

Originally Posted by Luay79

For sure! As for the confusion, all things should be clear within a month or two.

ASUS P67 MaximusIV Extreme has an NVIDIA NF200 chip on the board to boost the number of PCIe lanes up to 32, dual-GPUs at x16 on each slot or a set of three cards in Triple SLI at x16/x8/x8. I'm sure it will be at least $300 so I hope the SabertoothP67 has it as well.

The nf200 chip is a sham anyways. 16/8/8 SLI is grand on a P67 board, but sooner or later you hit 16 lanes to transfer the data. I wish I saved the bookmark for the exact numbers and reference, but there was definitely a latency hit by using Tri SLI on 16 lanes.

[draemn]

My thoughts based on roadmaps is that at the end of this year, discreet GPUs will break the 8x bandwith and you'll soon see high end gamers needing more than x16 lanes for dual GPU setup. There are a lot of people though who only stick with 1 high end GPU or they go dual GPU with slightly lower performance cards (to equal or beat the high end card) and only need 16 lanes for some time to come. It's probably a single digit percentage, the number of users who will utilize more than x16 lanes on any current offerings. If you know you're going to be always rocking dual GPU solution and upgrading to the cream of the crop later, stay away from x16, otherwise most people will be fine.

It is too bad though that intel is not taking computer gamers more seriously and they don't put more PCIe lanes just because.

[SugarJ]

Keep in mind that LGA1155 is targeted at a mainstream audience. The enthusiast platform will be the LGA2011 coming in Q4. So, keep your pants on, the multiple X16 PCI-E boards will be coming. Just not until the end of the year.

[Delavan]

Here is a review of 2 and 3 way crossfire HD6950/HD6970 and 2/3 way SLI on Sandy...

2-way and 3-way AMD CrossFire and NVIDIA SLI scaling on Intel Sandy Bridge by VR-Zone.com

Quote from VR's article:

For our two-card tests, we used the first and third slots for a x8/x8 configuration, again running directly off the processor.

They don't mention how much more performance could have been gained by using the 1366 Full 16x/16x over the 8x/8x SB platform...

The scaling EXPECTED from HD69** and GTX5** seems to be intact...isn't it?

Again quote from VR's article:

Some thoughts
While Intel Sandy Bridge-MS does not pledge inherent multi-GPU support, it is a waste to ignore its performance potential - particularly for multi-GPU systems. What the Intel Sandy Bridge microarchitecture offers for multi-GPU configurations, is higher IPC that alleviates processor bottlenecks which have plagued multi-GPU systems for so long.
Whether High-End Desktop (HEDT) offerings from Intel (involving the X58 IOH) are capable of lower PCIe latency compared to NF200 solutions or not is debatable. Due to involvement of human interfaces for 3D gaming applications, latency remains far more important than PEG bandwidth alone. This is something that typical, static 3D benchmarks cannot say for the real life gaming experience.
We're glad to report, that in either CrossFire or SLI situations, no noticeable issues were observed in games we tested. For maximal eye candy, there is no need to wait - gamers need not traverse to the future to enjoy state of the art gaming

So, is it a VIABLE option?

[Zink]

2011 is quad channel DDR3 and forty X16 PCI-E 3.0 lanes so save up your pennies. If bulldozer competes then we there will be amazing hardware at round i7 920 prices but otherwise Intel may just price the CPUs at $500+ and laugh at us.

[Delavan]

More on the same topic:

From BJORN3D's review

NOTE: Current Intel chipsets support PCI-Express 2.0 at a lower 2.5GT/s, which limits each direction of a lane to a maximum of 250MB/s. With USB 3.0 and 6Gbps SATA interfaces connected to PCI-Express x1 slots, devices connected to these interfaces will be limited to the 250MB/s speeds. A nice change on the P67 lineup of motherboards will allow the PCI-Express slots to operate at a stunning 5GT/s, providing up to 500MB/s of bandwidth in each direction. This adds up to 1GB/s bidirectional bandwidth.

Does that mean that the 5-6% loss from running on 8x/8x instead of on 16x/16x has been compensated?

[Luay79]

Originally Posted by Delavan

latency remains far more important than PEG bandwidth alone

Dude, you found the answer. Good one!!

Originally Posted by Delavan

Does that mean that the 5-6% loss from running on 8x/8x instead of on 16x/16x has been compensated?

If I understand it correctly, it means Sandybridge can unleash the real high bandwidth USB 3.0 and SATA6 installed in PCI-E slots are capable of, and ,hope I'm right here, without losing lanes on the other PCI-E slots.
On X58, if you use a 3rd PCI-E slot for SATA or USB, you lose the 16x16 on the first two, while bottlenecking the SATA6/USB3.0 device at 250MB/S.