Information needed on SLI

[Craigathorn]

Hi all,

 

Just wanted to see if anyone knows the answer to this as I've been looking in to it with my singular gtx 1080 card, and the issue I'm looking in to is whether it matters to put the card in a pcie x16 or pcie x8

 

from what I've found so far online it looks like the loss of the 8 lanes barely makes any difference with this card, with FPS only dropping by around 1% which wouldn't be noticeable. 

 

But then it got me thinking about the future, and what if I wanted to upgrade and get a second 1080 running in SLI? I know, overkill for any game we have now but at some point in the future probably worth looking at for true 4K 

 

anyways, I'm just curious as my mobo (asus maximus 8 hero) only has one x16 slot but a further two x8 slots. At the moment the flu is in the x16, but what would happen if I then wanted to use another card and SLI between a x16 and x8? Would that be ok or would there be deminishing returns, or would I have to use the two x8 slots instead?

 

the only alternative would be to switch mobo, but as we all know that's one hell of a pain in the ass. 

 

As always, thanks for any advice/knowledge given on this subject!  

[Oshino Shinobu]

There is currently no card that can fully saturate PCIe 3.0 8x (or PCIe 2.0 8X for that matter). Running it in 8x makes no difference to the performance of the card. 

[PRTI]

If your running the first card in x16 and the second card in x8 the first card will not go into x8 but will stay x16

 

PCIE Gen 3.0 x8 is enough for any modern GPU and you should not experience any loss