tiggerYour thread Title should be- Galaxy Shows off Z87 Hall of Fame Motherboard not Galaxy Shows [of] Z87 Hall of Fame Motherboard btarunr

AquinusYes, and those 64-lanes of PCI-E are still limited by the 16/20 lanes going to the CPU. :wtf:

btarunrPEX8747, like nForce 200, features broadcast functions. In multi-GPU, each GPU has a full copy of all the textures that go into rendering a scene. PEX8747 takes one copy, and broadcasts it like a radio station downstream. So that x16 bottleneck is not as bad as it seems. Textures are the most bandwidth-sensitive objects in a graphics pipeline.

AquinusOkay, I just want to correct your terminology because if you google PEX8747 and broadcast, you get this thread. You mean multicast, not broadcast. (Broadcast implies that all devices get it, multicast determines which of many gets a particular packet,) but I see what you mean. I took a gander at www.plxtech.com/download/file/1824

That's really only useful if you're going to have video cards on it and only video cards doing the same thing. I suspect performance would suffer if you had 3 cards and one of them was bitcoin mining or folding or if you put a non-graphics device on it.

Who knows though. I would be interested to see if it could be saturated though and how it compares to having a dedicated 16/8/8/8 on skt2011 versus a shared 16 lanes for 4 cards on this. Clearly you would need a few beefy video cards to saturate that with graphics alone.

I would love to see numbers though.

FourstaffIs it just me or does the board look sparse? Or is this common throughout all the Haswell boards?

AquinusYou mean how it only has 4 SATA ports and probably no external SATA chipsets? No extra USB 3.0 controller and probably no extra eSATA controller (right off the PCH maybe?)

It does look a bit feature lean with the exception of the PLX chip.

MabanA single 8747 split to four x8 slots would have been nearly identical in performance. The only way I can think of to make two PEX8747 switches equal four x16 slots would be to give each one just eight uplink lanes.

MabanA single 8747 split to four x8 slots would have been nearly identical in performance. The only way I can think of to make two PEX8747 switches equal four x16 slots would be to give each one just eight uplink lanes. I would love to see a Z87 board use a PEX8780 80 port switch to provide four x16 slots with a x16 uplink, just as a why not. An 8780 is likely more than double the price of a 8747, but so what, the people that buy this are already paying top dollar.

Mabanwww.anandtech.com/show/7043/computex-2013-galaxy-expanding-into-motherboards-psus-ssds

Anandtech says they are using a PEX8780 80 lane switch. Much love to Galaxy for trying this out.

cadavecaYou could tell by the number of surface-mounted components above each slot that they should have been x16 each. The bottom slot looks a bit weird to me though, so I kinda though it might be x16/x16/x16/x8