Vega's *Heavyweight* display and computer; edition 2012

[Mmatus89]

The interesting part was that while running PCI-E 2.0, the GPU utilization dropped way down as would be typically seen if you are "CPU" limited. In this instance I am not CPU limited, nor GPU limited. We are really at a point now that you can be PCI-E limited unless you go PCI-E 3.0 8x (16x PCI-E 2.0) or faster on all GPU's in the system. GPU utilization dropped down into the ~50% range due to PCI-E 2.0 choking them to death. As soon as I enabled PCI-E 3.0, the GPU utilization skyrocketed to 95+% on all cores. I was going to run more benchmarks and games but the results are such blow-outs it seems pretty pointless to do any more. It may interest some of those out there running these new PCI-E 3.0 GPU's in which they think they are CPU limited (below 95% GPU utilization) yet might have PCI-E bandwidth issues.

Down to the nitty gritty; if you run a single GPU, yes; a single 16x speed PCI-E 2.0 slot will be fine. When you start to run multiple GPU's and/or run these new cards at 8x speed, especially in Surround/Eyefinity, make sure to get PCI-E 3.0.

Question. These are my benchmarks that I have taken in the past 24 hours. I just got my 680 Friday afternoon.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...kJZaElRdTM3cFE

Is my PCI 2.0 being a bottleneck for the games where the GPU usage is under 80%? I started benchmarking some of my games and noticed the GPU wouldn't try so hard on certain games. Espcially in WoW, when I'm standing around in Stormwind I get like 150+ FPS with 100% GPU usage. Then I go into raid fights and it drops down to 70% and the FPS drops down to 70+ AVG. I don't know if this is due to GPU Boost self-clocking down or something else. If it's something else, how can I force my GPU to run 100% so I can benchmark the titles.
CPU: i7 2700k OC to 4.8 GHZ, MOBO: ASUS P8Z68-V Pro, RAM: 8 GB of G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 8-8-8-24, SSD: 256GB M4 Crucial Solid State Drive