Why should one buy a B250 Chipset MB over H270 Chipset MB Besides Money?

[pureGold]

(I really hope this is the correct forum to post in...)

 

So I have been dabbling in the custom built PC world and I have noticed that some threads here and elsewhere suggest B250 Chipset motherboards over H270 Chipset motherboards and I am curious on why. 

 

Say a shopper wants to put in a graphics card in their custom built such as a GTX 1060. Wouldn't the shopper want to use an H270 motherboard since it has more PCI-E lanes (20) which would maximize the card's performance compared to the B250 motherboard which has 12 PCI-E lanes? Most graphics card I see on Newegg use the PCI-E 3.0 x16 slot so I would assume it is best to have a motherboard with at least 16 lanes. 

 

Hopefully my question was clear enough. If not, I could just keep on researching until I find my answer.

[TheRandomness]

The motherboard doesn't provide the lanes, that's the job of the CPU/chipset, but most of the time, the CPU provides 16 (or more) lanes for the rest of the system to use.

[Guest]

8 minutes ago, pureGold said:

(I really hope this is the correct forum to post in...)

 

So I have been dabbling in the custom built PC world and I have noticed that some threads here and elsewhere suggest B250 Chipset motherboards over H270 Chipset motherboards and I am curious on why. 

 

Say a shopper wants to put in a graphics card in their custom built such as a GTX 1060. Wouldn't the shopper want to use an H270 motherboard since it has more PCI-E lanes (20) which would maximize the card's performance compared to the B250 motherboard which has 12 PCI-E lanes? Most graphics card I see on Newegg use the PCI-E 3.0 x16 slot so I would assume it is best to have a motherboard with at least 16 lanes. 

 

Hopefully my question was clear enough. If not, I could just keep on researching until I find my answer.

You can run an Nvidia gpu with x8 pci-e lanes. The difference between x16 and x8 is tiny in real world performance maybe 1 or 2 fps at best.

[pureGold]

25 minutes ago, TheRandomness said:

The motherboard doesn't provide the lanes, that's the job of the CPU/chipset, but most of the time, the CPU provides 16 (or more) lanes for the rest of the system to use.

So I'm assuming that since the max PCI-E lanes a B250 chipset has is 12 and for example the i5-7500 has 16, the total number of PCI-E lanes is still 12?

17 minutes ago, lee32uk said:

You can run an Nvidia gpu with x8 pci-e lanes. The difference between x16 and x8 is tiny in real world performance maybe 1 or 2 fps at best.

That is interesting. I would expect more of a performance hit with half the PCI-E lanes.

[TheRandomness]

12 minutes ago, pureGold said:

So I'm assuming that since the max PCI-E lanes a B250 chipset has is 12 and for example the i5-7500 has 16, the total number of PCI-E lanes is still 12?

That is interesting. I would expect more of a performance hit with half the PCI-E lanes.

No, it's combined with the PCIe lanes. You'd have 28 in total, in that case.

[pureGold]

On 6/3/2017 at 2:59 PM, TheRandomness said:

No, it's combined with the PCIe lanes. You'd have 28 in total, in that case.

In this Tom's Hardware thread, the first couple of answers say the buyer only has 16 PCI-E lanes to use coming from the processor. If the Z170 Chipset supports 20 PCI-E lanes, then how come the total of PCI-E lanes isn't 36?

 

I was looking at the B250 Chipset specifications Intel provides here and it says this chipset supports a max of 12 PCI-E lanes. Going back to what you said earlier, there wouldn't be 28 PCI-E lanes then. Wouldn't that mean there would be 4 unused PCI-E lanes if an i5-7500 was put into a B250 chipset motherboard? 

[TheRandomness]

42 minutes ago, pureGold said:

In this Tom's Hardware thread, the first couple of answers say the buyer only has 16 PCI-E lanes to use coming from the processor. If the Z170 Chipset supports 20 PCI-E lanes, then how come the total of PCI-E lanes isn't 36?

 

I was looking at the B250 Chipset specifications Intel provides here and it says this chipset supports a max of 12 PCI-E lanes. Going back to what you said earlier, there wouldn't be 28 PCI-E lanes then. Wouldn't that mean there would be 4 unused PCI-E lanes if an i5-7500 was put into a B250 chipset motherboard? 

Right, I think I worded my explanation badly earlier, as well as getting a few things wrong. Basically, the motherboard does not provide any PCIe lanes. It's just the main 'building block' for the rest of the computer. Only the CPU provided the PCIe lanes themselves. In a computer, it does not matter if there are any unused lanes, because they'll just stay exactly like that, just unused. They're only used by things such as PCIe devices (NVMe SSDs, PCIe graphics cards, stuff like that). The chipset, as said in that tom's hardware thread thing, can support the amount of lanes the CPU has up to a certain amount (as said on the Intel ark website), and it provides some lanes for the CPU to use for SATA devices and whatnot.

[Guest]

48 minutes ago, pureGold said:

In this Tom's Hardware thread, the first couple of answers say the buyer only has 16 PCI-E lanes to use coming from the processor. If the Z170 Chipset supports 20 PCI-E lanes, then how come the total of PCI-E lanes isn't 36?

 

I was looking at the B250 Chipset specifications Intel provides here and it says this chipset supports a max of 12 PCI-E lanes. Going back to what you said earlier, there wouldn't be 28 PCI-E lanes then. Wouldn't that mean there would be 4 unused PCI-E lanes if an i5-7500 was put into a B250 chipset motherboard? 

This link shows it better. Scroll down towards the bottom of the page to see the B250 block diagram.

 

http://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/2744-intel-i7-7700k-review-and-benchmark/page-2#!/ccomment-page=2