I was looking at this motherboard, and a friend pointed out that if I ever Crossfired/SLI'd two video cards together, I would be bottlenecking one of the PCIe 16X slots down to 8X speed due to the southbridge only supporting up to 24X.
Honestly, I have no idea what he is talking about, so could someone elaborate on this for me? What he says kind of makes sense, but I don't get how he knows that the south bridge supports 24X.
ID:278274
 Dec 27 2009, 5:57 pm
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Expansion Slots
PCI Express 2.0 x16 2 ( x16 / x8 ) The PCIEx16 and PCIEx8 slots support ATI CrossFireX technology That's right on the specs page btw. | |
<sarcasm>
Wow I love how you explained it all by just quoting the page... I totally understand it now... </sarcasm> | |
Spunky_Girl wrote:
<sarcasm> Well he at least verified what your friend said was true. Hopefully my explanation is a bit more informative. If it is difficult to understand I can try explaining a bit simpler. | |
If what your friend said was true (if someone understands how mothboards work and how a bottleneck like that would be made it is likely they are correct) then the reason a bottleneck would be created is the graphics cards (along with anything tied to the southbridge) are sharing a bus.
Simple explanation: Buses are the path that information must travel to reach one part of the mobo from another. Buses have a specific size capacity, which can be explained simply as how much data can travel across it at once. (Think of a highway and how many lanes it has determines how many cars can travel simultaneously.)
All communication from the graphics card(s) must go through the south bridge, so if it has a bus size that is not large enough to accommodate all of the data then you will have a bottleneck. That is assuming both graphics cards are being used at 100% which is incredibly unlikely but your friend's point still stands, especially considering other devices run off of your southbridge other than just your graphics card.
EDIT:
Sinfall wrote:
Apparently what your friend said is confirmed. I completely missed that. -.-'