Intel Q9450 vs Phenom 9850 - ATI HD3870 X2

[Hornet331]

There may be a valid argument here I believe -- from what I have been able to muster is that Intel's implementation of the 2.0 PCIe spec is not as good as AMD or nVidia's.

Anandtech made a passing comment that nVidia claimed they would not allow SLI on Intel chipsets because the Intel PCIe implementation was not very good... I am beginning to see reason in the data that this is probably true.

It is still hard to tell, it is not easy to isolate the PCIe performance on a board.

for multigpu solututions maybe, but afaik we where talking about singel cpu solutions. And even for multigpu solutions thers only marginal increasement.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...ss,1761-5.html

maybe with the new RV770 or G200 we would see better scaling between pcie 2.0 and pcie 1.0, but i doubt that.

edit:

also it depends a lot on the game:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...0,1915-10.html

just look at MS flight simmulator, with its insane texture size. If it would fit into the onboard ram there would be no problem.