Sli and Soundcard on an Asus M5a99x evo r2.0?

[Mobby Dick]

First my specs:

Asus M5a99x evo r2.0

AMD FX-8350 at 4.3 ghz

BeQuiet Pure Rock

Gigabyte GTX 960 4gb

Asus Xonar dx

 

As Pascal is coming nearer I'm thinking about picking up a second 960 when the prices will drop. My problem however is, that I want to use the two 960's in SLI while using a sound card without having a too big bottleneck with the PCIe lanes. So my question is if i can run the  two GPU's in SLI on x8 mode without having a performance impact because of the PCIe 2.0 slots? If that's the case, can I run the sound card on the third PCIe x16 slot and run them all together in x8/x8/x1? Unfortunately the Asus Website just says that 8x/8x is possible but no information on a third expension card...

 

Beside all the numbers would you recommend spending about 100€ on a second gpu? Or is it a waste of money for just a bit higher frame rates? Does it even make a difference when the cards run in x8 instead of x16 mode with PCIe 2.0?

 

Already a huge Thank You

[FurryZx]

8x PCIe 2.0, it probably will bottleneck I don't recommend running 8x 8x with PCIe 2.0. 2 way SLI is OK for price to performance.

[SLAYR]

4 minutes ago, Mobby Dick said:

First my specs:

Asus M5a99x evo r2.0

AMD FX-8350 at 4.3 ghz

BeQuiet Pure Rock

Gigabyte GTX 960 4gb

Asus Xonar dx

 

As Pascal is coming nearer I'm thinking about picking up a second 960 when the prices will drop. My problem however is, that I want to use the two 960's in SLI while using a sound card without having a too big bottleneck with the PCIe lanes. So my question is if i can run the  two GPU's in SLI on x8 mode without having a performance impact because of the PCIe 2.0 slots? If that's the case, can I run the sound card on the third PCIe x16 slot and run them all together in x8/x8/x1? Unfortunately the Asus Website just says that 8x/8x is possible but no information on a third expension card...

 

Beside all the numbers would you recommend spending about 100€ on a second gpu? Or is it a waste of money for just a bit higher frame rates? Does it even make a difference when the cards run in x8 instead of x16 mode with PCIe 2.0?

 

Already a huge Thank You

Nothing will bottleneck pcie 2.0 x8 yet, so there wont be a performance difference. 

You will have to remove your soundcard if you cant run both of the 960's at x8 speed since sli requires x8 speed for all of the cards in the syatem. 

[SLAYR]

2 minutes ago, FurryZx said:

8x PCIe 2.0, it probably will bottleneck I don't recommend running 8x 8x with PCIe 2.0. 2 way SLI is OK for price to performance.

SLI Titans dont even bottleneck pcie 2.0 x8.

 

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Impact-of-PCI-E-Speed-on-Gaming-Performance-518/

[Mobby Dick]

1 minute ago, SLAYR said:

Nothing will bottleneck pcie 2.0 x8 yet, so there wont be a performance difference. 

You will have to remove your soundcard if you cant run both of the 960's at x8 speed since sli requires x8 speed for all of the cards in the syatem. 

so a 8x/8x/1x mode is not possible on this mainboard?

[SLAYR]

Just now, Mobby Dick said:

so a 8x/8x/1x mode is not possible on this mainboard?

You said that asus only had configurations for x8/x8 for that board meaning that for a third pcie card it would have to be x8/x4/x1 and SLI needs x8 for all of the cards.

 

Check you motherboard manual for supported configurations.

[FurryZx]

3 minutes ago, SLAYR said:

Nothing will bottleneck pcie 2.0 x8 yet, so there wont be a performance difference. 

You will have to remove your soundcard if you cant run both of the 960's at x8 speed since sli requires x8 speed for all of the cards in the syatem. 

no, your sound card PCIe speed (width) does not matter with SLI.

[LokiFire]

x8 will affect GPU performance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Mobby Dick]

2 minutes ago, SLAYR said:

You said that asus only had configurations for x8/x8 for that board meaning that for a third pcie card it would have to be x8/x4/x1 and SLI needs x8 for all of the cards.

 

Check you motherboard manual for supported configurations.

well I did but there wasn't even a 8x/4x/1x config. does that mean that only two pcie cards are supported (what wouldn't make sense at all :D)