Been out of the loop for a while with PCIe versions. Now that 3.0 is the standard, how much of the bus would 7870s saturate compared to v2.0 PCIe slots? thanks in advance.
They wouldn't even fill 2.0. Maybe half, at a guess... I wouldn't say Gen3 is the standard yet, there is only one AMD board and a handful of Intel CPU's that supports it.
Thanks Pill Monster, I suspected that. I'd say v3.0 will be the standard for new mobos manufactured from now on though. Who wants to upgrade to older formats?
PCI-E 4.0 already in the spec development stage . We'll probably see that before the SATA3 successor (SATA4), despite SATA3 being 'much closer' to saturation. Another new technology coming up is DDR4, which apparently requires that only one RAM stick is used per channel, and they're 284 pin (vs 240 pin for DDR3). What this means is, if Ivy were DDR4, to support 2 slots of RAM would require socket 1243, and if you were to have 4 slots available for RAM, like motherboards do currently, you would require a socket 1811. Of course none of this such exists, it's just an extrapolation based on the DDR4 specs. So, when DDR4 comes in we will probably only be able to use 2 RAM sticks on a standard board, with 4 available slots on the MB reserved for the high-end enthusiasts CPU's. Getting back to your HD7870, it comes no where close to saturating PCI-E 3.0, PCI-E 3.0 would only be beneficial in such scenarios a running say, 2xHD7990's in crossfire, or 2xTitans in SLI, which still have headroom!