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To call this "the best gaming CPU you can buy" is a bit disingenuous. A $379 processor which can turbo boost up to 4.7GHz is pretty impressive. It is however st
by diab0lic 9y ago
To call this "the best gaming CPU you can buy" is a bit disingenuous. A $379 processor which can turbo boost up to 4.7GHz is pretty impressive. It is however still limited to 16 PCIe lanes which means you get one GPU at PCIe 3.0 x16 and are very limited in the additional expansion cards you can run. Sure there are additional lanes for a single NVMe disk and the motherboard's onboard components but:
Want to add a PCIe x1 wifi card? Your GPU now runs at 8x.
Want to add a second GPU? They're both running at 8x.
This is a pretty solid processor for the most common use case of single high end GPU + everything else built into the motherboard (including wifi) but that is far from the "best gaming CPU you can buy." I have friends who are going threadripper for the additional PCIe lanes, I know it belongs in a different price class but this is about the best CPU not the most cost efficient -- I suspect this processor would not land in the best bang for buck category either.
- vbezhenar 9y agoWhat's the difference between x16 and x8 for gaming GPU? Textures will load for 0.25 seconds instead of 0.125 seconds at startup? I was under impression that there's virtually no gain for games with x16 compared to x8.
- diab0lic 9y agoIt seems you're right, at least as recently as last year [0] the difference seems very negligible. I had read that it was in 2013 but had assumed increases in GPU speeds exacerbated the effect. [0] https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/2488-pci-e-3-x8-vs-x16-performance-impact-on-gpus https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/2488-pci-e-3-x8-vs-x16-pe...
- compton_effect 9y agoTo add on, even pcie 3.0 x4 has plenty of bandwidth for a gtx 1080. https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_1080_PCI_Express_Scaling/25.html https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_1080_... This is the same reason why nvidia didn't bother with HBM for the 10 series. Those gpu's do not need that much memory bandwidth and in most cases GDDR5 provides plenty of bandwidth as it is.
- jrs95 9y agoFrom what I've seen, there's barely an advantage to be had from multi-GPU configurations in gaming anyways. Not worth all the headaches imo.
- sushisource 9y agoBig problem here is that it's pretty typical to have a nice SSD sitting on a PCI-E lane, or, somewhat more rare but I have one, a nice sound card sitting on a PCI-E lane. That makes this a no-go for me, since it'll ruin the GPU throughput.
- pdimitar 9y agoDamn. I have a secondary Ethernet card and a 7.1 sound card both on PCI slots (smaller than the one the GPU occupies). Does that mean my GTX 980 is crippled? If so, wow.
- diab0lic 9y agoThe good news is that there is some discussion in sibling threads that seem to indicate the 8x slot will lose you maybe a single frame per second. You can check what your card is running at using GPU-Z, make sure to run something intensive as the card will enter a slower state to save power when it isn't being used.
- pdimitar 9y agoI had GPU-Z for a long time but never knew I could use it like that. Thanks a bunch! Much appreciated.