PCIe 3.0 AM3/AM3+

Printed From: ASRock.com
Category: Technical Support
Forum Name: AMD Motherboards
Forum Description: Question about ASRock AMD motherboards
URL: https://forum.asrock.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=1140
Printed Date: 22 Dec 2024 at 1:04pm
Software Version: Web Wiz Forums 12.04 - http://www.webwizforums.com

Topic: PCIe 3.0 AM3/AM3+

Posted By: khan.sikki
Subject: PCIe 3.0 AM3/AM3+
Date Posted: 31 Oct 2015 at 11:37pm

Hello Friends,

Why there was no mother board designed for AM3 / AM3+ with pcie 3.0, up to my knowledge only ASUS have this achivement

http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/SABERTOOTH_990FXGEN3_R20/" rel="nofollow - SABERTOOTH 990FX/GEN3 R2.0

Replies:

Posted By: ASRock Expert
Date Posted: 01 Nov 2015 at 12:10am

The PCI-e Gen3 is based on the CPU,
so, until AM4, no PCI-e Gen3 for AMD users.

Sabertooth is just a fake advertisement.

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990FX Extreme 9 MOD P1.70
AMD FX 8120 4GHz 1.25V
Thermalright HR-02
Patriot Viper 2x4GB 2133MHz
Samsung 850 EVO 250GB
MSI R7970 TFIII 3GB
CORSAIR VX550W
LanCool K62 Dragonlord
ASUS Xonar D2X

Posted By: Xaltar
Date Posted: 01 Nov 2015 at 1:02am

It is a pretty heated topic on some forums, the ASUS board you mentioned claims PCIe 3.0 support yet many say it is only emulated not true PCIe 3.0. Given that no GPUs currently available in the consumer segment can fully saturate or bottleneck on PCIe 2.0 x16 bandwidth there is no way to determine if ASUS' claims are true or just a BIOS trick that fools the OS into detecting PCIe 3.0. The only reason anyone would want PCIe 3.0 is for SLI/Crossfire solutions as PCIe 2.0 x8 is about the same bandwidth as PCIe 3.0 x4 so with more than 2 GPUs you will be running into some bottleneck on a PCIe 2.0 board. Personally I don't see what all the fuss is about, you lose only a tiny amount of performance via bottleneck anyway given that multi GPU scaling yields diminishing returns for every GPU you add past 2 anyway. There is no way to know for sure if the GPUs are bottlenecking or if it is just the scaling causing a performance hit.

When we are talking at best an extra 1 or 2 FPS on only the highest end multi GPU systems vs PCIe 2.0 I don't see why any manufacturer would wast time and energy trying to implement PCIe 3.0 on an AMD board aside perhaps from doing what ASUS did and emulate it so far as the OS is concerned. Manually setting my Z97 Extreme 3 to PCIe 2.0 makes absolutely no difference to my benchmarks neither does setting it to PCIe 1.0 with my GTX 960 though 1.0 may bottleneck a higher end card, a little.