Z170 tech specs

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   I think Parsec hit the nail on the head. These restrictions come from the architecture which no board manufacturer can really change without adding significant cost to the product. Repeated testing has been performed with each successive generation of graphics cards and PCIe iterations and in all cases it has been shown that 8 PCIe 3.0 lanes are not fully saturated by any current gen consumer grade GPUs. This trend goes back to PCIe 1.0 and the GPUs available when the standard was current. AMD even allows crossfire with PCIe x4 being provided to the second GPU and so far as I have seen, even when it does bottleneck the GPU the bottleneck is small on high end GPUs and non existent on midrange GPUs.
If anyone wants more PCIe lanes available they have to be willing to fork out for enthusiast platforms.

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Xaltar Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Moderator Group Joined: 16 May 2015 Location: Europe Status: Offline Points: 25028	Post Options Post Reply Quote Xaltar Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 23 Oct 2015 at 2:10am
	I think Parsec hit the nail on the head. These restrictions come from the architecture which no board manufacturer can really change without adding significant cost to the product. Repeated testing has been performed with each successive generation of graphics cards and PCIe iterations and in all cases it has been shown that 8 PCIe 3.0 lanes are not fully saturated by any current gen consumer grade GPUs. This trend goes back to PCIe 1.0 and the GPUs available when the standard was current. AMD even allows crossfire with PCIe x4 being provided to the second GPU and so far as I have seen, even when it does bottleneck the GPU the bottleneck is small on high end GPUs and non existent on midrange GPUs. If anyone wants more PCIe lanes available they have to be willing to fork out for enthusiast platforms.

vannex Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Newbie Joined: 21 Oct 2015 Location: Canada Status: Offline Points: 6	Post Options Post Reply Quote vannex Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 23 Oct 2015 at 8:34am
	Parsec - fair enough. I suppose it was a little harsh of me to claim false advertising. The issue is really that the x16/x8/etc. terminology is being used to describe both physical slot size as well as the number of lanes a slot supports electrically. In its advertising, a marketer will of course choose its wording to maximize the perceived value of their product. In this case, stating the physical slot size creates a higher perceived value ("2 x16 slots" vs. "1 x16 slot and 1 x8 slot"). A similar situation exists with hard drive storage capacities. For example, a capacity of 2 trillion bytes can be represented as "2 TB" or "1.8" TB, because TB is ambiguous. Again, marketers will use the measure which maximizes consumers' perceived value. Thankfully, we now have the standardized binary prefixes which were introduced to eliminate this ambiguity (1.8 TiB is approximately 2 trillion bytes, and 2 TB is 2 trillion bytes). It really comes down to the consumer being informed about what they are buying. I guess that's why we have forums like this one!