The i7-960 and PCI-e lanes
1 hour ago, Spartaton said:I'm re-purposing my old pc which has an i7-960 in it. Since the pc is so old I might have to add some expansion cards if I want more modern functionality (such as usb 3.0). I couldn't find any info on how the i7-960 deals with PCI-e lanes myself so I was wondering if anyone here knew.
As mentioned before, prior to Sandy Bridge, the northbridge (a chipset on the board rather than a functionality of the CPU) was responsible for the PCIe lanes on Intel CPUs. AMD's 9-series chipsets also operate in this fashion, if you were wondering. The X58 chipset provides up to 36 lanes for your upgrading pleasure, though your motherboard manual will usually specify exactly how your lanes are divided among the slots.
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/chipsets/workstation-chipsets/workstation-chipset-x58.html
Note that it's PCIe 2.0, so keep this in mind when selecting an expansion card to insert. While there's nothing stopping you from plugging a PCIe 3.0 card into a PCIe 2.0 slot, you may get reduced performance due to the slower interface.
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