so many of us only ever end up using one slot on our motherboard usually for a
GPU but what would happen if you filled
all of them it's not that unrealistic
let's say you're a gamer you got to have your GPU but you also need to connect
your desktop to Wi-Fi so you throw in a wireless card You Stream So you need a
capture card and you've got a pretty big game Library so you're out of m.2 slots
so you add some more storage with one of these babies then there's the fact that
you've got this natural attraction to PCS with lots of USB ports so you throw
in one of these and that's five cards which happens to be the same or more
than most modern motherboards can accept will this overload your system in some
way well as is the case with so many
things in PC land the answer depends on
what kind of CPU and motherboard you have what cards you're using and exactly
what it is you're trying to do further complicating matters is that even PCI
Express slots that look identical can operate at very different speeds let's
break it down some slots connect directly to your CPU While others
connect to your motherboard's chipset the CPU direct ones are generally going
to provide the smoothest experience since they're not going to be shared
with any other devices the issue is that
the PCIe lanes the data paths that feed
these slots add a lot of cost and complexity to the CPU U that's where
chipset Lanes come in in PC terms the
chipset is a chip or well set of them if
you will that lives on your motherboard and handles a great deal of your
computer's input and output or IO SATA
ports USB ports and network ports are commonly connected to the chipset and on
Modern platforms that requires a lot of
PCIe lanes Intel z790 chipset for
example supports up to 28 additional
PCIe Lanes but this presents a problem
which we'll tell you about right after we thank our sponsor Shopify Shopify is
a powerful Commerce platform that will help you start grow and manage your
business actually our merch store over at LTD store.com is powered by Shopify
and since 2019 we've processed hundreds of thousands of orders thanks to their
amazing tools and features like a simple drag and drop store Editor to build a
fully functional website from scratch and Integrations with our favorite
social media platforms they also provide simple but effective marketing tools and
realtime insights into customer shopping behaviors with Shopify live view so
don't wait go to shopify.com tequ and
join the millions of people from all around the world that use Shopify as the
foundation for their business the problem is that the chipset itself has
to have some kind of link to your CPU and this link usually takes the form of
you guessed it PCI El Lanes now as you
can imagine there wouldn't be much cost savings if this link had the same number
of lanes as the downstream chipset so typical desktop systems cut that link
all the way down to just eight or even four lanes now in most cases that's not
a huge deal and to illustrate why let's think of our system kind of like a
restaurant the CPU can be the kitchen and the connected devices can be our
customers our GPU is going to sit at the 16-seater VIP table over here every
guest gets a dedicated Chef so no one ever goes hungry and the same goes for
the four-seater family and friends table where our boot SSD hangs out as for the
rest of the dining room well hey as long as their orders are staggered Nobody
ends up waiting too long for their meal and in the real world that's usually how
things go down expansion cards like Wi-Fi sound or USB and SATA cards even
capture cards are very unlikely to all be operating at Peak capacity at the
same time and even if they did they wouldn't come close to saturating that
link back to your CPU because of their relatively low data
rates however where you can run into
problems is if you're using your chipset lanes for high-speed storage let's say
for example you work with large amounts of highresolution video footage you
could overwhelm the link between the chipset and the CPU in multiple ways for
example by transferring footage from an external drive that uses the fastest
versions of USB or Thunderbolt to a high-speed PCIe drive that's also
running off the chipset this could result in lower than expected speeds and
even slow down anything else that is connected to the chipset imagine for
instance a capture card that starts dropping frames whenever you do a file
transfer another thing to watch out for especially you Gamers is that many CPUs
allow the 16 Lane GPU slot to be split
into two eight Lane slots this is good
because it gives users the flexibility to install two gpus for machine learning
or a GPU and another high performance accelerator but it comes at the cost of
reducing the bandwidth to your main GPU
making matters worse the way the lanes are split up is not always easy to
control you might consult your motherboard manual good idea by the way
and think oh okay these two slots can
share 16 Lanes but I only really need one lane for this Wi-Fi card that leaves
15 lanes for my GPU but it doesn't work
like that the mere Act of installing another card any card in that slot will
more than likely cut your GPU bandwidth in half fortunately your gaming
performance won't drop that much but there are cases where these fine details
can make a big difference this high-speed network card for example uses
16 lanes that run at Gen 4 speeds if we
put it into a gen three motherboard that's okay it'll work but it will run
at half the bandwidth but then if the
slot on that motherboard were to only get eight Lanes now we've cut the
overall bandwidth in half again to just one quarter of what the card expected
oops don't get too freaked out though you don't have a network card like that
at home and unless you're moving around large amounts of data regularly you
likely won't notice slowdowns just from having all of your slots filled if you
you do need more Lanes though the good news is there are solutions workstation
and Enterprise platforms like AMD's Threadripper and epic or Intel Xeon are
built with a huge number of PCIe lanes connected directly to the CPU the only
problem is that if you need one of those you're going to have to figure out how to get one of your kidneys out as
painlessly as possible thanks for watching if you guys
liked this video check out our other video on PCI Express gen 7