today I'll be using a synthetic Benchmark in this case 3D Mark 11 to
evaluate something that I have received
a lot of questions about over the years
so what you may or may not notice is that I have changed my testbench I have
gone with an Intel x58 platform for this
particular test I'm using the Gigabyte G1 gorilla
motherboard's get you guys better look at that G1 gorilla motherboard with an
Intel Cor i7 960 so that is a quad core processor
I've got that chip clocked at 4 GHz in
order to reduce the any CPU bottlenecks
that may occur in my test and now okay
no do not always ask before opening this file so what I'm going to be looking at
today is the effect of PCI Express bandwidth on SLI performance so you can
see I have not used the top slot and there's a very good reason for that if I
populate the top slot then it will run at 60x bandwidth and then if I populate
the second slot I will have two cards running at 16x bandwidth if I populate
these two slots I will have two cards
running at here we are PCI e16 at adex
bandwidth so I'm just going to switch to the other card and show you guys here so
there you are at 8X bandwidth so that is
what we're going to test I'm going to see what the 3D Mark score is running in
these two slots versus these two slots so you guys can see how much of a
difference there is in performance okay so for my first run through we got X
3386 3386 3D marks in 3D Mark 11 so now let's
run them at 60 next and see what kind of performance boost we get from giving
them the full available bandwidth our two card configuration running the same
test achieves
3,389 3D marks so for
comparison at 8X and 8x bandwidth we
achieved 3,386 3D
marks so we oh oh hold on hold on no no we should put in the other one
3389 okay divided by
3386 to find out the performance Improvement .1
or rather that's a
.01% performance Improvement by going from 60 uh 8X 8X to 16x 16x PCIe 2.0
slots so um to anyone who wants to run
SLI or Crossfire on the Intel p67
platform I guess this means you're pretty safe from performance degradation
even with high performance gpus like the GTX 580 thank you for checking out this
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