P55 with 32 extra PCIe Lanes

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nakedpeanut

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So was doing my rounds of article skimming, from Anandtech to Toms to Guru3d and came across this ECS P55H-AK review: http://www.guru3d.com/article/ecs-p55h-ak-review/
It's quite an interesting board, especially since it offers 3 way SLI/crossfire at 16x 8x 8x AND has USB3 and SATA3...

LOL Liked this part: "Also spot the diagnostic POST LED with will display error and status codes, unfortunately ECS forgot to list the actual diagnostic codes in the manual, so it is useless."

Never the less it's quite an interesting board, where even sli and dedicated physx should be possible..
But at an expected price of 299 USD It's basically in x58 territory..
So do you think it's worth while, or maybe just overspecced for a midstream chipset?
 
Over priced on the P55 platform I think, the NF200 does that to a board. If you are going SLI/xfire you probably have a 890FX or X58 board, not P55. And that diag LED is useless after bootup, just sits there displaying FF while other boards display CPU temp.
 
Agreed.. I dont think they did a proper target market analysis with this product, and just went overboard on features.
Pitty but it does look good.
 
Especially considering that there are similar products from EVGA and Asus at a lower price point. EVGA/Asus @ lower price vs ECS? Tough one... :whistle:
 
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pcie-geforce-gtx-480-x16-x8-x4,2696.html

GTX 480 in SLI on 16x 8x and also on 4x...
Conclusion:
The big question today was whether or not we needed more than 16 lanes to feed multiple high-end graphics card in SLI, and the answer is a solid “perhaps not.”

OK, let’s call it a conditional "no.”

While we did see a fairly large difference between x8 and x16 slots when a single card was used, adding a second card shifted our limit to CPU performance. That is to say, for most of today’s tests, a faster CPU would be far more important than dual x16 slots in achieving the ultimate SLI performance.
Click to expand...

There is a decrease in performance. Whether you'll notice it.. Nah..
 
Remember to get a 30" display, it's the only way you can appreciate anything crazy fast like that!
 
If you're going to SLI a GTX480 or xfire a 5970 I don't see why you would buy a cheap board like this. For someone on a budget, this will do fine if he/she were to go SLI/Xfire
with 5870s or the like

Those cards will tear through games as well, so you'll only have to worry about the x8 bottleneck if you're into benchmarking where you will actually notice a difference. If you're averaging 120FPS with those cards a 10% hit in performance won't be noticeable in games.
 
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Archer said:
Over priced on the P55 platform I think, the NF200 does that to a board. If you are going SLI/xfire you probably have a 890FX or X58 board, not P55. And that diag LED is useless after bootup, just sits there displaying FF while other boards display CPU temp.
Click to expand...


NO. NF200 just dynamically moves around the available bandwidth. It doesn't give more lanes.


Silverlight said:
Dudes, x8 2.0/x8 2.0 DOES NOT really bottleneck SLI/Xfire setups.
Click to expand...

Actually anything from a GTX275/5830 is bottle necked by a PCI express 2.0 slot at 8x.
 
Qwikslver said:
NO. NF200 just dynamically moves around the available bandwidth. It doesn't give more lanes..
Click to expand...

My understanding of NF200 - instead of PCIe lanes going from GPU to CPU they all get routed via the NF200 first. So your PCIe slots do get more bandwidth (more lanes) but the CPU will still only see 16 PCIe lanes (on P55 boards). It takes the 16 lanes and multiplies them by two essentially. For most people saying that it adds 16 lanes is the simplest way of explaining the performance increase.
 
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