Skylake Build

Rohan Matkar · March 5, 2016

I am looking to build a skylake desktop for my personal and gaming use. I am very confused about the total number of PCIe lanes that ill be able to use in this build. I want to use a GTX 980 Ti, Asus Xonar essence sound card and an intel 750 series PCIe SSD.
The i7 6700k has 16 PCIe lanes. The z170 chipset has 20 PCIe lanes. The motherboard Asus maximus 8 extreme has PLX chip which increases the number of total PCIe lanes. So I am not able figure out the total number of PCIe lanes I will get in this build as I want to run these cards on their maximum bandwidths. I would really appreciate if you can help to figure this out. Also, I will be grateful to you if you can shed some light on PLX chips as I am not able to find out any appropriate information about it.

Dzzope · March 5, 2016

The difference between a 908ti at x16 and x8 PCI-e 3.0 is marginal at worst... about 1-2% which is in tests margin of error really and not noticable in any way.. It would only become a problem if you were trying to run sli 980ti's along with the rest.

Also the sound card and SSD aren't full pci-e3.0 x16 and as such don't take as many lanes.. Instead of going skylake, go x99, have 2 more cores, extra pci lanes and cost about the same.