Thursday, August 4th 2011
Production Gigabyte G1.Sniper 2 Features PCI-Express Gen. 3
About a month ago, we were treated to the first pictures of G1.Sniper 2, Gigabyte's first LGA1155 motherboard in its G1.Killer series of motherboards targeting the gamer-overclocker market segment. High resolution pictures showed the prototype of having PCI-Express Gen. 2 slots like most other LGA1155 boards. It turns out, according to a photo-session of a production sample by tech-blog SIN's Hardware, that Gigabyte refined the design with the production version (the one that will be sold in the markets), it features PCI-Express 3.0 (Gen. 3) graphics slots.
For a LGA1155 motherboard to have Gen. 3 PEG slots, it requires Gen. 3 specifications compliant switching circuitry, which wasn't available to motherboard vendors when they were designing their first LGA1155 boards. With availability of those components, motherboard vendors are not wasting any time in rolling out new variants of their LGA1155 boards that feature Gen. 3 PCI-Express slots. Gigabyte placed "PCI-Express 3.0" marking on the board manually using stickers, going on to show that adding Gen. 3 slots indeed may have been a last-minute decision at Gigabyte. The other interesting marking on the G1.Sniper 2 carton is the mention of the board being ready for upcoming 22 nm "Ivy Bridge" Core processors. More pictures, and a preview at the source.
Source:
SIN's Hardware
For a LGA1155 motherboard to have Gen. 3 PEG slots, it requires Gen. 3 specifications compliant switching circuitry, which wasn't available to motherboard vendors when they were designing their first LGA1155 boards. With availability of those components, motherboard vendors are not wasting any time in rolling out new variants of their LGA1155 boards that feature Gen. 3 PCI-Express slots. Gigabyte placed "PCI-Express 3.0" marking on the board manually using stickers, going on to show that adding Gen. 3 slots indeed may have been a last-minute decision at Gigabyte. The other interesting marking on the G1.Sniper 2 carton is the mention of the board being ready for upcoming 22 nm "Ivy Bridge" Core processors. More pictures, and a preview at the source.
19 Comments on Production Gigabyte G1.Sniper 2 Features PCI-Express Gen. 3
but i think fucking managers fron intel will present us new chipset ex. p77 and said that only on p77 you can overclock our new ivy bridge using 133mhz blck, but if you want 150mhz blck you should buy z77 :banghead:
Any its always good to new spicy Components :D and i think it is time for me to be prepared for Ivy Bridge.
tech.163.com/digi/11/0729/15/7A4VKDTB00162OUT_5.html
Also, Asrock has taken a stab at Asus and Gigabyte for having faux PCI 3.0 slots.
Err, not sure what I posted is correct. Perhaps they were saying Asus and Gigabyte are lacking PCI 3.0
i think gen3.0 is like usb3.0, because i can`t see superiority usb3.0 on 2.0, yes, it`s faster a bit, but not more faster than 2.0
of course 3.0 x8 = 2.0 x16 it`s good, but can`t see superiority 2.0 x16 on x8:banghead:
in benchmarkes only and sometimes in games less fps around ~1-2
sinhardware.com/images/sniper2preview/IMG_6784%20(Small).JPG
I think PCI-E 3.0 offers more bandwidth, but at this point its a gimmick.
USB 3.0:
SATA 3.0 Gb/s:
Likewise, PCIe 3.0 will offer similar benefits to devices that are natively capable to make use of it. Specifically, with future AMD cards planning to use IOMMU capabilites, traffic over the PCIe bus could potentially see a dramatic increase that current stuff just isn't capable of. Don't forget that PCIe isn't just CPU-to-devices, but also device-to-device. ;)
But that isn't really the case, but it is just that the traditional high bandwidth cards that we think of normally won't use it. The fact is that even the next generation of graphics cards won't come close to maxing out PCI-E 2.0 x16, and probably barely show a difference at PCI-E 2.0 x8. However, the cards that will show a difference will be PCI-E x1 cards, specifically SATA 6.0Gb/s RAID cards. Saddly, most motherboard manufacturers will probably keep wiring the x1 slots to the southbridge so they will still be 2.0 slots...
GTX 480 article
Only a 7% loss in performance when limiting bandwidth to 25% of the original? Another way is that you lose about 5 fps on average when going from 5 GT/s to 1.25 GT/s. On a GTX 480 that seems odd to me.
The results were almost the same with the 5870:
5870 article