PCIE 3.0 Sabertooth X79

[RAA]

System has Ivy Bridge E 4820K, all seems to running fine. GPUZ says PCIE 2.0 @16x for my SLI setup. I thought IB had native support for PCIE 3.0? Have read that Nvidia will release a new driver to enabled PCIE 3.0 by default for 780 and Titan, will they do the same for my 770 GTX SLI?

Have heard there is a patch to enable PCIE 3.0 but the one I saw was for 6XX only cards.

 

[Ajay57]

I am not sure about the patch how ever you could have a look in the bios under PCI-E, in mine i can select which one i want to use!! Also it is unlikely you could fully use PCI-E 2 anyway and try to run the RENDER TEST IN GPU-Z, as it changes during the test and it will indicate what your lanes are running at.

It should read like this,

AUTO.
PCI-E GEN2.
PCI-E GEN3.

You could also double check in the users manual as well, to make sure you have this option in the Bios first!

AJ.

 

[EarthDog]

Damn.. RAA, update your sig, LOL!

Anyway, I had no idea enabling PCIe3 on these boards were a per card type thing in the first place... that would be news to me. Like Ajay said, be sure it is on auto or select PCIe3 in the bios just to make sure. If that doesn't do it, make sure your bios is updated to the latest version.

Last, the difference between PCIe3 and 2 is negligible in the first place so, no performance worries anyway.

 

[RAA]

Lol, my sig is quite amusing isn't it.

Gen3 is enabled in the bios which is the latest version. Manged to get pcie3 working with the patch but it frustrates me having to do that when the motherboard and graphics cards both have PCIE3 as a major part of the design on the box and the only reason I upgraded to Ivy Bridge E was for PCIE3. I run triple monitors, and 8x 8x pcie2 just doesn't cut it.

So it's working, but I don't know if my system will be stable. At first glane it appears stable at 4.8ghz which I cannot complain too much about.

Surely Nvidia could get really screwed over this, false advertising and all!? Now they say it's only for 780 and Titan, does anyone with either of those cards need the patch to get pcie3? Have read they've done that to get more 780 and Titan sales.

 

[EarthDog]

As I mentioned earlier, PCIe is not really tied to the card per say. From the 6 series I believe, they were PCIe3 compatible with the appropriate chipset (Z68/Z77/Z87). If you would have went with one of those chipsets, no problems.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/GeForce-600-Series-Kepler-X79-PCIe_3.0,16091.html

Here is the reasoning:

Some motherboard manufacturers have released an updated SBIOS to enable the Intel X79/SNB-E PCI Express 2.0 platform to run at up to 8GT/s bus speeds. We have tested GeForce GTX 680 and GTX 670 GPUs across a number of X79/SNB-E platforms at 8GT/s bus speeds, but have seen significant variation in signal timing across different motherboards and CPUs. Therefore we’ve decided to only support and guarantee PCI Express 2.0 bus speeds on X79/SNB-E with our standard release drivers. Native PCI Express 3.0 platforms (like Ivy Bridge) will run at 8GT/s bus speeds with our standard release drivers.

As far as 8x/8x with two cards or PCIe 2 to 3, the performance difference is as I said negligible really (it is not until you get to 3+ cards it makes a difference). You pretty much made a costly upgrade for little/no gains.

As far as stability, I would worry more about the 4.8Ghz whatevercpuyouhave is stable more so than this patch.

 

[Ajay57]

I must be one of the lucky ones as mine shows PCI-E 3.0 X 16 on my X79 Platform, but bit of useless info to the OP i would say. Sorry to hear you had to use a patch, but again as ED already said, the Diff between the 2 is little to nothing. Because we are not fully using the PCI-E 2 and can not saturate the bandwidth as i have read to believe.

AJ.

 

[EarthDog]

The 690 has this 'native' support apparently. The article I linked describes exactly that.

 

[RAA]

But not the 770 and will it ever have native support? I had a Z68 system stable at 4.9ghz, upgraded to X79 and Ivy E because everyone was saying that's what's needed for native pcie3 support. CPU ran BF4 at 4.8ghz last night for a few hours and has passed a couple of intel burn tests, trying for 4.9ghz but it's struggling.

I have triple 770's, maybe I should have gone with triple 690's. What a load of bs though, they should all be sued for false advertising. If it's not big deal, why all the hype around it?

 

[EarthDog]

You can't use 3 690s.

As far as the advertising... 'The more you know'..

 

[Woomack]

GTX770 should run on PCIE 3.0 without any issues. Check if there is any new BIOS. Also diagnostic software is sometimes showing PCIE 1.1 or 2.0 when card is in idle.
Check what is showing GPU-Z when you run 3D test in small window.

 

[Ajay57]

2 x EVGA GTX 690's would be the same as a "QUAD SET UP" and have the same sort of GPU power as the Titan's!! Looking into the EVGA WEB SITE most members use the X79 Platform to run Multi GPU Set up's as that is what its designed to do.

AJ.

 

[RAA]

Well I've read about some with 680's getting slow downs and black screens, have not had that issue so far but the 770 is based on the 680 hence my concern, or maybe it was only a Sandy issue. In 3DMark11 and Heaven, there's no difference between 2 and 3 but I suspect if I cranked the settings up and used a triple screen resolution with three cards, there would be a quite a significant difference.

Think I might have got lucky, my CPU could have been a dud stuck at 4.5ghz or something and my cards could have crashed with pcie3.0. I just hope Nvidia provides native support for my cards in the future or at the very least doesn't release a driver that breaks the patch.

It seems to work so far and no definite answers, I don't appreciate being conned into something that might or might not work and I'm quite sure Nvidia and the motherboard manufacturers have broken some laws here.

 

[EarthDog]

but I suspect if I cranked the settings up and used a triple screen resolution with three cards, there would be a quite a significant difference.

Why would you think this? It is a 680 with different clocks is all. There will be no difference between 3 680's and 3 770's at the same clock speeds (all other variables remaining the same). Now, PCIe wise, and PLX versus real lanes, yes, there will be a difference. But 3 of each card on the same systems there will not be.

Please change your signature to reflect your current hardware.

 

[NiteSmoker17]

as far as the PCIE bus difference between 2.0 and 3.0 i refer you to this article
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Intel/Ivy_Bridge_PCI-Express_Scaling/23.html

 

[EarthDog]

Exactly where I pulled the information from.