Vortez - Computer Hardware News & Reviews » News » March 2012 » NVIDIA GTX 680 Drivers Limit Card To PCI-E 2.0 On X79

Citing patchy support for PCI-E Gen 3 on the SB-E/X79 platform, NVIDIA have taken the step of only supporting Gen 2.




Buyers of the NVIDIA GTX 680 may be disappointed to read some news in the specification small print for their new top-end card:



PCI-E Gen 3 support for Sandy Bridge-Extreme was initially a little hit and miss, mainly down to the relatively few Gen 3 add-in cards around to test Intel's implementation against. Later vendor motherboards have chosen to implement it, but it's certainly not universal across the whole platform; playing safe with compatibility NVIDIA have taken the decision to disable it entirely.

It's not clear if benchmarks published yesterday were run using pre-release drivers on X79 with PCI Gen 3 enabled or those which will be seen by the majority of end-users, but this will have made some difference in certain benchmarks. Generally speaking, PCI 3.0 is known to have the largest impact in compute scenarios and multi-card configurations where PCI-E 2.0 8x would present a bottleneck; gaming applications however tend to be substantially less impacted by moving from Gen 2 to Gen 3.

The good news is that Intel's Ivy Bridge CPU, with what's believed to be a more mature implementation of PCI-E 3.0, probably isn't all that far away. Furthermore as testing and validation continues to take place NVIDIA may decide to implement it on selected X79 boards after all.

If there's any controversy it'll mostly be a storm in a teacup, but you'd be forgiven for feeling sympathy for adopters of X79/SB-E.

Source: TechPowerUp, Anandtech

Tagged as: NVIDIA, GTX 680, Kepler, PCI-E 3.0

20.03.2012 18:55:43: NVIDIA GTX 680 Gets Listed at Various Retailers by Tony Le Bourne
12.03.2012 15:25:13: NVIDIA GTX 580 Price Drop by Tony Le Bourne
21.02.2012 15:18:36: NVIDIA GK104 to get GTX 670 Ti Branding by Tony Le Bourne
20.01.2012 18:22:21: NVIDIA GK110 (Kepler) GPU Spotted In The Wild by Tim Harmer
17.06.2011 21:33:37: CoolIT Systems Announces Availability of OMNI N590 for NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590 by Alex Hull

Helios1234 Posts: 2570 Joined: 2009-02-17

#24086 Posted on: 23.03.2012 19:14:42 WTF, I hope ASUS have some sort of BIOS fix assuming it's not fully down to hardware. It also means the majority of test rigs out there will be impacted albeit very marginally.

BurningFeetMan Posts: 104 Joined: 2012-01-06

#24094 Posted on: 24.03.2012 07:45:23 It makes no mention of pci-e 3.0 on z68. I'm guessing that's unaffected?

Click here to post a comment for this news story on the message forum

Vortez - Computer Hardware News & Reviews » News » March 2012 » NVIDIA GTX 680 Drivers Limit Card To PCI-E 2.0 On X79