Am i gonna get worse 'horsepower' from running something monstrous like 2 9800GX2's if the motherboard isnt PCI-E 2.0 compatible and runs each of the PCIE slots at x8 in SLi mode?
If you're gonna spend the cash on getting 2 9800GX2's you would only be doing it justice if you bought a PCI-E 2.0 mobo instead of running them in SLI x8 IMO.
The problem is that i MUST buy all the parts at my local shop (AUS Sydney). So the only motherboard like that they have is double the price of the one ive selected.
As long as you have a 680i board it runs in dual 16x mode. Only craptacular 650i boards run 8x/8x and YES you will notice the difference on 8x/8x vs 16x/16x. I have had both types of boards and the 8x SLI did in fact bottleneck the sli performance.
Sorry to kind of hijack this thread. veedubfreak, are you saying that all 680i boards support pcie 2.0? Or are you saying that although they might not support pcie 2.0, they do support dual 16x mode?
I'm actually thoroughly confused now. Let me try to give an example.