GTX 980 Tri-SLI w/ 1440p Surround (3) monitor setup

[Sephonia]

@Muramasa That info is all well and good, and I am waiting for higher VRAM cards (and if TI's get released, which im pretty sure they won't, ill grab those) but I do have one glaring question.
I constantly hear people talk about "this board has Nx16 PCIe slots" but if you look at the processors available, i.e. the 5960x, the "max number of PCIe lanes" is 40.

 

-Expansion Options

PCI Express Revision 3.0

Max # of PCI Express Lanes 40

(from http://ark.intel.com/products/82930)

 
So doesn't that make anything more that x16/x16/x8 (total 40) irrelevant, since my processor doesn't even support more than 40 PCIe lanes? Or am I misinterpreting this information?
 

 

-Edit basedlinus to the rescue He literally JUST did a video about this ahaha- 

Well, seems like it's a negligible difference, at least on the 5930 w/ 3 980 4Gb cards.

[Muramasa]

@Muramasa That info is all well and good, and I am waiting for higher VRAM cards (and if TI's get released, which im pretty sure they won't, ill grab those) but I do have one glaring question.I constantly hear people talk about "this board has Nx16 PCIe slots" but if you look at the processors available, i.e. the 5960x, the "max number of PCIe lanes" is 40.

 

So doesn't that make anything more that x16/x16/x8 (total 40) irrelevant, since my processor doesn't even support more than 40 PCIe lanes? Or am I misinterpreting this information?

 

 

-Edit basedlinus to the rescue He literally JUST did a video about this ahaha- 

Well, seems like it's a negligible difference, at least on the 5930 w/ 3 980 4Gb cards.

Aaaaaaand that's where the test fails. In resolution. It does have the cards running in 3x 16x, but 4gb can handle 4K. Once you go beyond 4K you really need all the help you can get. And remember these cards bottleneck by memory usage when they hit the cap, not gradually. So those 980s could very well of been using like 3.8gb.

And on the pcie lanes, the are 40 pcie 3.0. Lanes from your CPU, and 8 pcie 2.0 lanes from the chipset. And the magical missing 8 pcie 3.0 lanes needed to run 3 cards at 16x comes from a PLX chip. I'm not 100% on the PLX chip part though, only an assumption.