Thread: x8x8

There is already a console that does its rendering in the cloud. Welcome to OnLive.com
PCs will be next. I am even working on a project at home to render 3D graphics on my personal cloud. Its coming very soon.

I have observed that I could not find crossfire mobos that ran in true x16/x16. It seems that only SLI systems do that; it makes me wonder how much dual 16 lanes matters.

I was running SLI with the same cards I have now on a mobo with dual x8 lanes and I upgraded to a dual x16; the CPU change in that upgrade was minimal (dual core 2.6 to dual core 2.8) but from DDR400 to DDR2800; there was no change in performance at all. That being said my cards pale in comparison to new ones; my SLI rig is equal to a single GTS450.

Point being, I have seen a number of arguments that no cards are actually saturating that full bandwidth yet anyway. Not sure how true that is... But it means a huge cost difference in mobos also; the high end ASUS non dual x16 mobo is under 100 and the Dual x16 starts at 135ish. For crossfire I don't think there is even an option; just x8/x8 or x16/x4.

It also depends what you mean by "saturate". In most of the comparison tests, the 16x/16x SLI cards outperformed the 8x/8x cards by about 3%. This is marginal, seeing how going from single card to SLI/Crossfire increased performance from 40-45%, regardless of the 16x/16x or 8x/8x.

PCI Express And SLI Scaling: How Many Lanes Do You Need? : The PCIe Bottleneck?