GTX970

[blimbat16]

hey guys, im buying two MSI GTX 970's and an asus maximus 7 motherboard and plan to run them in SLI, and i was just wondering as on asus's website it just says 2x PCIe 3.0 x16 and says supports sli, but does this mean both cards will run at x16 bandwidth or will they both run at 8x because i cant seem to find much help and also if they would be running at 8x bandwidth would i loose performance and be better off buying a motherboard that would run them both in 16x ?? i know that a lot of questions asked, but answers would be massively appreciated, thanks in advance

[sapphirethunder]

I'm going to assume you are going to buy the Asus Maximus VII Hero.

 

That one has only 8x-8x configuration. So you would be pretty much better off with just 1 GTX 970 on 16x.

 

 

You can however run 2 of them in SLI even as 8-8 but you wouldn't really gain any real performance over running just 1 of them.

You would just share the load between 2 cards.

 

 

So either get other motherboard which does have 16x-16x or just leave out the other graphics card.

[MegaDave91]

They will run in 8x/8x mode because Haswell/Devil's Canyon cpus (4690k/4790k) have 16 pcie lanes. 

 

There will be NO performance loss with the aforementioned 8x/8x configuration. I have no idea what @sapphirethunder is talking about, because that is very false. The performance is NOT halved at 8x because 8x is still PLENTY.

[othertomperson]

I'm going to assume you are going to buy the Asus Maximus VII Hero.

 

That one has only 8x-8x configuration. So you would be pretty much better off with just 1 GTX 970 on 16x.

 

 

You can however run 2 of them in SLI even as 8-8 but you wouldn't really gain any real performance over running just 1 of them.

You would just share the load between 2 cards.

 

 

So either get other motherboard which does have 16x-16x or just leave out the other graphics card.

 

No. A thousand "no"s. You will not saturate 8x PCI-E lanes with a graphics card. You will not tell the difference between 8x and 16x whatsoever. If you need two 970s for epic surround or 1440p at an ungodly framerate, or 4K 60fps then do it and don't worry about how many lanes each card gets.

[blimbat16]

I'm going to assume you are going to buy the Asus Maximus VII Hero.

 

That one has only 8x-8x configuration. So you would be pretty much better off with just 1 GTX 970 on 16x.

 

 

You can however run 2 of them in SLI even as 8-8 but you wouldn't really gain any real performance over running just 1 of them.

You would just share the load between 2 cards.

 

 

So either get other motherboard which does have 16x-16x or just leave out the other graphics card.

umm no im buying an asus 7 maximus RANGER board as pointed out earlier, also i know it doesnt work like that !

[blimbat16]

They will run in 8x/8x mode because Haswell/Devil's Canyon cpus (4690k/4790k) have 16 pcie lanes. 

 

There will be NO performance loss with the aforementioned 8x/8x configuration. I have no idea what @sapphirethunder is talking about, because that is very false. The performance is NOT halved at 8x because 8x is still PLENTY.

 

 

No. A thousand "no"s. You will not saturate 8x PCI-E lanes with a graphics card. You will not tell the difference between 8x and 16x whatsoever. If you need two 970s for epic surround or 1440p at an ungodly framerate, or 4K 60fps then do it and don't worry about how many lanes each card gets.

ok thank you both very much ill just run them both in 8x bandwidth then this info has really put my mind to rest cheers again:)