- Joined
- Oct 12, 2009
Hi.
I plan to upgrade my PC to a Giga-byte P55-UD3R /I5 750/4GB (2 X 2GB) G.Skill F3-12800CL7D-4GBRH 7-7-7-7-21 @ 1.65V/ATI 5850/PC power & Cooling 610
Quality, fast and cheap; just the way I like it! Those G.Skill modules are the tightest AND lowest voltage I could find and they are cheap. (If you have a better suggestion...)
Won't do any crossfire, but could add a cheaper Juniper 5700 series video card for dedicated A.I., physics or faster OpenCL, DirectCompute.
I have 3 questions for you guys about P55 chipset that could change my mind on my choice of motherboard and/or video card:
The 2 X physical 16X slot can have one the the following 2 electrical configuration:
1- 2 X 8X (8X + 8X) or 1 X 16X
2- 1 X 16X and 1 X 4X
QUESTION 1: For config 1, when you choose to have only 1 slot @ 16X, what happen with the second 16X physical slot? It's just disabled?
For config 2, the 4X electrical is provided by the P55 PCIe 2.0 lanes. The only thing is the data has to go through the 2GB/s QPI link already shared with everything else (USB, SATA, Ethernet). See Intel diagram:
QUESTION 2: Is the 2GB/s QPI link use 4 of the 8 lanes of the P55? Unless the link is not PCIe at all? I try to understand why nearly all P55 motherboard offer so few PCIe slots. On paper you have 16X from the CPU and 8X from the P55. In theory, you could have:
1 X 16X and 1 X 8X or
1 X 16X and 2 X 4X or
1 X 16X, 1 X 4X and 4 X 1X
I think the last one would be the most interesting. You cloud have a 5850X2 plus a 4X RAID controller or a dedicated physics card plus 4 other 1X PCIe add-on card such has a second Ethernet controller, an Asus Xonar sound card, a video capture card and still have 1 PCIe slot left!
QUESTION3: Is there any P55 motherboard that have this 1 X 16X, 1 X 4X and 4 X 1X configuration? I just wish Giga-byte could do a P55-UD3R but with this PCIe configuration!
QUESTION 4: In the diagram, you can see the 16 lanes of the CPU having 16GB/s of bandwidth or 1GB/s per lane. That would mean PCIe Version 3 as version 2 is only 500GB/s per lane. Is my assertion right? If so, then an ATI 5850X2 could be a fantastic choice, if ATI would do a 5850X2 PCIe Version 3...
Ramon Zarat
I plan to upgrade my PC to a Giga-byte P55-UD3R /I5 750/4GB (2 X 2GB) G.Skill F3-12800CL7D-4GBRH 7-7-7-7-21 @ 1.65V/ATI 5850/PC power & Cooling 610
Quality, fast and cheap; just the way I like it! Those G.Skill modules are the tightest AND lowest voltage I could find and they are cheap. (If you have a better suggestion...)
Won't do any crossfire, but could add a cheaper Juniper 5700 series video card for dedicated A.I., physics or faster OpenCL, DirectCompute.
I have 3 questions for you guys about P55 chipset that could change my mind on my choice of motherboard and/or video card:
The 2 X physical 16X slot can have one the the following 2 electrical configuration:
1- 2 X 8X (8X + 8X) or 1 X 16X
2- 1 X 16X and 1 X 4X
QUESTION 1: For config 1, when you choose to have only 1 slot @ 16X, what happen with the second 16X physical slot? It's just disabled?
For config 2, the 4X electrical is provided by the P55 PCIe 2.0 lanes. The only thing is the data has to go through the 2GB/s QPI link already shared with everything else (USB, SATA, Ethernet). See Intel diagram:
QUESTION 2: Is the 2GB/s QPI link use 4 of the 8 lanes of the P55? Unless the link is not PCIe at all? I try to understand why nearly all P55 motherboard offer so few PCIe slots. On paper you have 16X from the CPU and 8X from the P55. In theory, you could have:
1 X 16X and 1 X 8X or
1 X 16X and 2 X 4X or
1 X 16X, 1 X 4X and 4 X 1X
I think the last one would be the most interesting. You cloud have a 5850X2 plus a 4X RAID controller or a dedicated physics card plus 4 other 1X PCIe add-on card such has a second Ethernet controller, an Asus Xonar sound card, a video capture card and still have 1 PCIe slot left!
QUESTION3: Is there any P55 motherboard that have this 1 X 16X, 1 X 4X and 4 X 1X configuration? I just wish Giga-byte could do a P55-UD3R but with this PCIe configuration!
QUESTION 4: In the diagram, you can see the 16 lanes of the CPU having 16GB/s of bandwidth or 1GB/s per lane. That would mean PCIe Version 3 as version 2 is only 500GB/s per lane. Is my assertion right? If so, then an ATI 5850X2 could be a fantastic choice, if ATI would do a 5850X2 PCIe Version 3...
Ramon Zarat