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so many of us only ever end up using one slot on our motherboard usually for a

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GPU but what would happen if you filled

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all of them it's not that unrealistic

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let's say you're a gamer you got to have your GPU but you also need to connect

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your desktop to Wi-Fi so you throw in a wireless card You Stream So you need a

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capture card and you've got a pretty big game Library so you're out of m.2 slots

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so you add some more storage with one of these babies then there's the fact that

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you've got this natural attraction to PCS with lots of USB ports so you throw

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in one of these and that's five cards which happens to be the same or more

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than most modern motherboards can accept will this overload your system in some

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way well as is the case with so many

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things in PC land the answer depends on

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what kind of CPU and motherboard you have what cards you're using and exactly

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what it is you're trying to do further complicating matters is that even PCI

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Express slots that look identical can operate at very different speeds let's

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break it down some slots connect directly to your CPU While others

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connect to your motherboard's chipset the CPU direct ones are generally going

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to provide the smoothest experience since they're not going to be shared

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with any other devices the issue is that

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the PCIe lanes the data paths that feed

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these slots add a lot of cost and complexity to the CPU U that's where

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chipset Lanes come in in PC terms the

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chipset is a chip or well set of them if

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you will that lives on your motherboard and handles a great deal of your

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computer's input and output or IO SATA

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ports USB ports and network ports are commonly connected to the chipset and on

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Modern platforms that requires a lot of

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PCIe lanes Intel z790 chipset for

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example supports up to 28 additional

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PCIe Lanes but this presents a problem

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foundation for their business the problem is that the chipset itself has

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to have some kind of link to your CPU and this link usually takes the form of

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you guessed it PCI El Lanes now as you

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can imagine there wouldn't be much cost savings if this link had the same number

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of lanes as the downstream chipset so typical desktop systems cut that link

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all the way down to just eight or even four lanes now in most cases that's not

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a huge deal and to illustrate why let's think of our system kind of like a

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restaurant the CPU can be the kitchen and the connected devices can be our

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customers our GPU is going to sit at the 16-seater VIP table over here every

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guest gets a dedicated Chef so no one ever goes hungry and the same goes for

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the four-seater family and friends table where our boot SSD hangs out as for the

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rest of the dining room well hey as long as their orders are staggered Nobody

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ends up waiting too long for their meal and in the real world that's usually how

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things go down expansion cards like Wi-Fi sound or USB and SATA cards even

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capture cards are very unlikely to all be operating at Peak capacity at the

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same time and even if they did they wouldn't come close to saturating that

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link back to your CPU because of their relatively low data

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rates however where you can run into

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problems is if you're using your chipset lanes for high-speed storage let's say

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for example you work with large amounts of highresolution video footage you

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could overwhelm the link between the chipset and the CPU in multiple ways for

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example by transferring footage from an external drive that uses the fastest

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versions of USB or Thunderbolt to a high-speed PCIe drive that's also

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running off the chipset this could result in lower than expected speeds and

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even slow down anything else that is connected to the chipset imagine for

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instance a capture card that starts dropping frames whenever you do a file

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transfer another thing to watch out for especially you Gamers is that many CPUs

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allow the 16 Lane GPU slot to be split

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into two eight Lane slots this is good

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because it gives users the flexibility to install two gpus for machine learning

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or a GPU and another high performance accelerator but it comes at the cost of

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reducing the bandwidth to your main GPU

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making matters worse the way the lanes are split up is not always easy to

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control you might consult your motherboard manual good idea by the way

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and think oh okay these two slots can

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share 16 Lanes but I only really need one lane for this Wi-Fi card that leaves

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15 lanes for my GPU but it doesn't work

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like that the mere Act of installing another card any card in that slot will

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more than likely cut your GPU bandwidth in half fortunately your gaming

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performance won't drop that much but there are cases where these fine details

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can make a big difference this high-speed network card for example uses

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16 lanes that run at Gen 4 speeds if we

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put it into a gen three motherboard that's okay it'll work but it will run

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at half the bandwidth but then if the

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slot on that motherboard were to only get eight Lanes now we've cut the

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overall bandwidth in half again to just one quarter of what the card expected

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oops don't get too freaked out though you don't have a network card like that

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at home and unless you're moving around large amounts of data regularly you

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likely won't notice slowdowns just from having all of your slots filled if you

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you do need more Lanes though the good news is there are solutions workstation

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and Enterprise platforms like AMD's Threadripper and epic or Intel Xeon are

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built with a huge number of PCIe lanes connected directly to the CPU the only

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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

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painlessly as possible thanks for watching if you guys

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liked this video check out our other video on PCI Express gen 7