Expected Ivy Bridge performance

[Lepton87]

I agree 100%. PCIE 3.0 is a HUGE plus for IB.

Folks who are using 2x top-end GPUs (GTX 580 or 7950/7970) will see decent performance gains compared to their SB rigs that are using x8 x8 setups today. For those using 3 or 4 GPUs, 1155 never made much sense anyway, so thats probably not an issue. For that much $$$, they are either still using X58 rigs with 980x or 990x or have moved to SB-E.

Yeah, it's a huge plus especially for people using GTX 580s which doesn't support PCI-E 3.0

 

[Hulk]

I built a new system just after the summer and went with the 2500k because of the $100 price difference to the 2600k and also because the performance increase to the Hyperthreaded Ivy would be large enough to warrant an upgrade.
I wouldn't upgrade if I'd gone with the 2600k in the first place.
Then again we really don't know exactly what the performance delta will be from Sandy to Ivy from application to application. There might be an application that really cooks with Ivy and that could by itself provide the impetus to upgrade.

 

[grkM3]

Yeah, it's a huge plus especially for people using GTX 580s which doesn't support PCI-E 3.0

gtx580 is pcie 16x...so lets do some simple math for you

2x gtx580 is 32x

sandy bridge only has 16 lanes,16x...get it?

Now with ivy that supports pcie 3.0 and they are double the bandwith so your same 16 lanes act like 32 lanes so technically you could run both 580s at 16x by 16x

 

[Lepton87]

gtx580 is pcie 16x...so lets do some simple math for you

2x gtx580 is 32x

sandy bridge only has 16 lanes,16x...get it?

Now with ivy that supports pcie 3.0 and they are double the bandwith so your same 16 lanes act like 32 lanes so technically you could run both 580s at 16x by 16x

So? IvyBridge won't do anything about that, it's still going to work in 8x/8x PCI-E 2.0. Maybe with a modernized NF200 chip it could work like you described.

 

[grkM3]

So? IvyBridge won't do anything about that, it's still going to work in 8x/8x PCI-E 2.0. Maybe with a modernized NF200 chip it could work like you described.

Nope

ivy bridge supports 16 lanes at 3.0 spec,you are right its going to be 8x by 8x but at 3.0 spec witch is like having 16x by 16x since its double the bandwith.

 

[Lepton87]

Nope

ivy bridge supports 16 lanes at 3.0 spec,you are right its going to be 8x by 8x but at 3.0 spec witch is like having 16x by 16x since its double the bandwith.

But you need to have a card that supports PCI-E 3.0 and right now only AMD 7000 series support PCI-E 3.0. For GTX 580 it's still going to be 8x/8x PCI-E 2.0 so no improvement whatsoever.

 

[grkM3]

The 580 will run at 16x 2.0 the cpu will handle the bandith of 2 of themat there native speed

 

[joseph0042]

I wish they would just release some hard information...

 

[Joseph F]

The 580 will run at 16x 2.0 the cpu will handle the bandith of 2 of themat there native speed

What makes you think that?
You would roughly twice as many leads running to the PCI-E slots for that to work.
(Which IB obviously doesn't, as it uses the same socket as SB)

 

[gramboh]

The 580 will run at 16x 2.0 the cpu will handle the bandith of 2 of themat there native speed

Wrong, it will run at PCI-e 2.0 spec, 8x per slot. The CPU will revert to PCI-e 2.x for PCI-e 2.x devices.

And I still do not understand why people are saying games will see a performance increase from SB @ 4.5GHz to IB @ 5GHz... maybe 1-5 fps here and there, but nothing substantial and min FPS will barely move. If you have the money, go for it, but it will not be a major upgrade. 860 @ 3.6GHz to SB @ 4.5GHz is a huge difference (architecture), the proper comparison would be SB @ 4.5GHz to Haswell @ 5.5GHz.

 

[rgallant]

just rambling
one thing that still confuses me are the pci-e switching chips that are on the z68 boards- some say will cripple the 3.0 on ib

-but will the z77 have these chips ,is that to switch x16 to x8,x8 [sli] and will they be fully rated for the 3.0 code.

-I think some or all x79 have them and is that why intel does not still list the 38xx-39xx as pci-e 3.0 ?

 

[Lepton87]

just rambling
one thing that still confuses me are the pci-e switching chips that are on the z68 boards- some say will cripple the 3.0 on ib

-but will the z77 have these chips ,is that to switch x16 to x8,x8 [sli] and will they be fully rated for the 3.0 code.

-I think some or all x79 have them and is that why intel does not still list the 38xx-39xx as pci-e 3.0 ?

I have such a chip on my mobo and it's role is to split 16lanes from the CPU into 16x/16x/8x for graphics cards. You don't need such a chip for 8x/8x, only very few high-end mobos actually have NF200, they were very useful before SB-E launched. On X79 you would only need them if you wanted 16x/16x/16x or 16x/16x/16x/16x.