How much of an improvement will the new SLI boards that will run both PCI E slots at 16x instead of 8x. They arent on the market yet but i saw one at Asus's website.
Well dual 16x lanes should theoretically allow twice the bandwidth to each card for SLI systems, but I'm not sure whether that would give any significant inprovement in performance yet. Especially with games which are most CPU bound.
I thought that most SLI boards run both lanes ar 16x anyway......or have i been understanding 2 x PCI-e 16x wrong....
No with 1 card you have 16x, when you have 2 in SLI the motherboard assigns each 8x lanes so overall bandwidth is same as with a single card, albeit increased processing power.
ahh okay now I understand...come to think of it I've been seeing adverts in computer mags saying 2 PCI-e slots running at 8x each...that confused me as i thought they were going backwards...hah:
Right now, the extra lanes raise a ceiling that's not being tapped as is, so as already mentioned, you're not going to see a benefit. PCIe is based on lanes with have 1GB/s combined between up and down-streams. 16x lanes have 16GB/s available bandwith, for example. If you've already got an SLI board, you're just going to waste time, money and effort to go to an SLI board with dual 16x lanes. On the flip-side, if you're going to get an SLI setup, looking at those boards over the current SLI crop might not be a bad deal, depending on the additional cost for one.
