MSI Marshall Big Bang P67 mobo - let's chat

[DeltrusDisc]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-595-_-Product

So, I had come across this board at least a few weeks ago, but didn't look too deeply into it. I just tonight was looking at it again, also talking with a couple other computer geeks in my guild about it, and we were debating like, wtf do you do with this monster? So, if I'm reading it right off that page on newegg, if you want to SLI or Crossfire, you can go full dual x16 cards, one in slot 1, and one in slot 5. So they would also knock out slots 2 and 6 no doubt because of the sizes of most video cards nowadays. To keep those slots x16, you need to keep slots 3 and 7 empty. So essentially if you wanted to go dual SLI/Crossfire with full dual x16 cards, you'd only have two open PCIe slots left for SATA controllers. Granted, I'm still learning things, so if I'm totally wrong on any of this, please call me out, I don't do the whole SLI/Crossfire scene. I'm a WoW player and see no need for going further than one video card. :P

Sooooo, say you only wanted to put a video card in slot 1, and then you had everything else, 'cept for slot 3 to fill up at your pleasure. What would you do with it? (Assuming you have absolutely no budget, you may go crazy with this thing.) I know I'd probably get a RevoDrive or two, some more SATA drives, go full on insanity SSD and have a blast. Probably get a GTX 570 or 580. (Not interested in 3D.) Would love to hear some other crazy ideas.

So yeah, essentially this is a topic talking about this absolute beast of a board, what its potential is, what it's flaws (if any) are, and what you'd do with it if you had the cash to go balls to the wall with it.

[Deleted]

Not so much you can do when you only have 24 PCI-E lanes to use; of which a single graphics card will consume 16.

The net result is basically identical to every other board on the market.

[DeltrusDisc]

So then what is the point in all those PCIe slots if you can only use up to 24?

[Wries]

It has more lanes for communication between graphics cards with the help of the NF200. (effectively this will be reported by CPU-Z, nvidia cp and ati catalyst as 16x/16x) Still communicating with CPU through 16 lanes.

But really. Efficiency > bandwidth. 8x/8x is not bad it's just not as future proof for coming generations of cards.

[DeltrusDisc]

Okay so inc obvious noob question. But what would it take the mobo companies to make a mobo that can have several PCIe slots, like these, and have them all x16 no matter the population of other lanes. I'm sure at some point we'll have that based on how technology works, constantly getting better, but what kind of stuff would they be looking at? I wonder if they could do it now... would probably cost a fortune though.

[Xuvial]

Okay so inc obvious noob question. But what would it take the mobo companies to make a mobo that can have several PCIe slots, like these, and have them all x16 no matter the population of other lanes. I'm sure at some point we'll have that based on how technology works, constantly getting better, but what kind of stuff would they be looking at? I wonder if they could do it now... would probably cost a fortune though.

PCI lane speeds aren't limited by the motherboard, they're limited by the chipset/CPU. All PCI lanes, USB ports, Sata ports, etc go directly to the CPU and the ridiculous speeds that PCIe 16x can put out means that current CPU's can only handle two 16x or four 8x at maximum, it simply can't coordinate anything more. Look at it this way - people have noticed some pretty big performance increases out of their multi-GPU setups after they overclocked/upgraded their CPU.

Pre-P67 chipsets also had issues with their PCI lanes slowing down when stuff was connected to USB3/Sata3.

Big-Bang could drive all eight lanes to go at 16x if the chipset/CPU actually existed...but for today's purposes all those lanes are moot.

[DeltrusDisc]

PCI lane speeds aren't limited by the motherboard, they're limited by the chipset/CPU. All PCI lanes, USB ports, Sata ports, etc go directly to the CPU and the ridiculous speeds that PCIe 16x can put out means that current CPU's can only handle two 16x or four 8x at maximum, it simply can't coordinate anything more. Look at it this way - people have noticed some pretty big performance increases out of their multi-GPU setups after they overclocked/upgraded their CPU.

Pre-P67 chipsets also had issues with their PCI lanes slowing down when stuff was connected to USB3/Sata3.

Big-Bang could drive all eight lanes to go at 16x if the chipset/CPU actually existed...but for today's purposes all those lanes are moot.

Ohhh! Well that explains quite a bit, and makes a load of sense. (Of course.) So how much does it depend on how many cores you have versus clock speed on the CPU? Like, say someone had an i5-2500K at stock 3.3ghz, vs for ease of thought, let's say some 8 core Ivybridge at 3.3ghz, for all that we know IB will have 8 core CPUs apparently. Would that make as big or bigger of a difference compared to like overclocking an i5-2500K to 4.7ghz or something like that?

Forgive me if I'm absolutely terrible. x_x

[Wries]

For the record Ivy bridge is a die shrink of Sandy bridge. It might bring more cores but we wouldn't know yet. You're thinking of Sandy Bridge EX (LGA2011) when you're thinking 8-core.

[Xuvial]

Ohhh! Well that explains quite a bit, and makes a load of sense. (Of course.) So how much does it depend on how many cores you have versus clock speed on the CPU? Like, say someone had an i5-2500K at stock 3.3ghz, vs for ease of thought, let's say some 8 core Ivybridge at 3.3ghz, for all that we know IB will have 8 core CPUs apparently. Would that make as big or bigger of a difference compared to like overclocking an i5-2500K to 4.7ghz or something like that?

Forgive me if I'm absolutely terrible. x_x

A chip is limited to what a chip is limited to, overclocking won't change that. Even if you could OC a 2500k to a fantastic 6ghz it simply wouldn't support more than the PCI speeds that it's limited to now.
For all practical purposes quad-fire/SLI going at 8x/8x/8x/8x is the absolute maximum required today, so CPU/Motherboard manufacturers simply aren't going to bother with technology that supports anthing higher than that.
To go at 16x/16x/16x/16x you'll need a whole new generation of processors+mobos, Ivy Bridge *may* bring something like that to the table but I highly doubt it since it's near pointless.

I also just remembered that top-end X58 mobo's were the last mobo's that supported crossfire/SLI at 16x/16x. I looked around but couldn't find a single P67 mobo that could pull of 16x/16x, which is....strange. I don't think even Big-Bang can do 16x/16x, I'm sure it defaults to 8x/8x like Maximus IV.

[DeltrusDisc]

For the record Ivy bridge is a die shrink of Sandy bridge. It might bring more cores but we wouldn't know yet. You're thinking of Sandy Bridge EX (LGA2011) when you're thinking 8-core.

Ah ok. Thanks for the correction.

---------- Post added 2011-05-31 at 09:33 AM ----------

A chip is limited to what a chip is limited to, overclocking won't change that. Even if you could OC a 2500k to a fantastic 6ghz it simply wouldn't support more than the PCI speeds that it's limited to now.
For all practical purposes quad-fire/SLI going at 8x/8x/8x/8x is the absolute maximum required today, so CPU/Motherboard manufacturers simply aren't going to bother with technology that supports anthing higher than that.
To go at 16x/16x/16x/16x you'll need a whole new generation of processors+mobos, Ivy Bridge *may* bring something like that to the table but I highly doubt it since it's near pointless.

I also just remembered that top-end X58 mobo's were the last mobo's that supported crossfire/SLI at 16x/16x. I looked around but couldn't find a single P67 mobo that could pull of 16x/16x, which is....strange.

None?! x_X
Well that's..... annoying. I guess for me though, if in the case of the original post, that keeps becoming more and more obsolete and flat out wrong to me, heh, it would all come down to, I wouldn't probably use more than one lane at the full x16 speed. As far as I know, only GPUs take advantage of x16 anyways, yeah? Better fill up those slots with SATA controllers. We're going 5TB of SSD space. >_>

That would be awesome.

[Xuvial]

More specifically only top-end GPU's.
The fastest single-GPU i.e. a GTX580 would only see a ~5-8% performance drop if you forced it to run at 8x instead of 16x. Only dual-GPU cards like GTX295, HD5970, GTX590 and HD6990 can make proper use of the massive bandwidth 16x provides because they force two chips to go via a single lane.

It's why I really scratch my head sometimes when I see people running something like HD6990 Crossfire at 8x/8x. Lolwut.

[vesseblah]

Ohhh! Well that explains quite a bit, and makes a load of sense. (Of course.) So how much does it depend on how many cores you have versus clock speed on the CPU? Like, say someone had an i5-2500K at stock 3.3ghz, vs for ease of thought, let's say some 8 core Ivybridge at 3.3ghz, for all that we know IB will have 8 core CPUs apparently. Would that make as big or bigger of a difference compared to like overclocking an i5-2500K to 4.7ghz or something like that?

The number of PCIe lanes does not depend on the CPU speed or number of cores at all, but how the IO part of the processor is designed, or to be precise on the front side bus (Intel calls theirs DMI or QPI). The speed of communication between the CPU and Northbridge (P55, X58, P67, Z68 etc) puts an upper limit to how many PCIe lanes the CPU can operate at once, Northbridge just divides the CPU's single pipe to many PCIe devices on demand.

X58 chipset had double wide FSB (named QPI) with maximum speed of 25Gbps compared to all older Intel chipsets (DMI) with only 10Gbps speed which explains why X58 could use up to 40 PCIe lanes at the same time but other chipsets were limited to 20-24. AMD did things differently, as the CPU had RAM controller built in and memory talked directly to CPU instead of Northbridge. AM3 socket has 'only' 3.2Gbps link to Northbridge which handles up to 22 PCIe lanes. On Intel side most of the 10/25Gbps speed is reserved for RAM.

Intel's new Sandy Bridge processors have RAM controller built in, but for some reason they still opted to support only 24 PCIe lanes in P67/Z68 chipset, probably for manufacturing or marketing reasons so that they can sell the extreme edition boards later with support for faster chipset to replace X58.

---------- Post added 2011-05-31 at 12:52 PM ----------

I also just remembered that top-end X58 mobo's were the last mobo's that supported crossfire/SLI at 16x/16x. I looked around but couldn't find a single P67 mobo that could pull of 16x/16x, which is....strange. I don't think even Big-Bang can do 16x/16x, I'm sure it defaults to 8x/8x like Maximus IV.

Theoretically 16x/8x would be possible as the P67/Z68 NB's support 24 PCIe lanes, but to achieve that speed you would have to shut down USB3, SATA3 and NICs which are reserving few lanes out of the maximum of 24.

[DeltrusDisc]

That explains a lot.... more. Guess we maybe have something to really look forward to with the CPUs in late 2011 and possibly with Ivybridge. Thanks for the posts guys, if you have anything else to add, I'll be watching this thread. Definitely been enlightened to a lot here.

---------- Post added 2011-05-31 at 09:57 AM ----------

Theoretically 16x/8x would be possible as the P67/Z68 NB's support 24 PCIe lanes, but to achieve that speed you would have to shut down USB3, SATA3 and NICs which are reserving few lanes out of the maximum of 24.

This kind of bugs me... makes me wonder just how much I'll be able to upgrade with my measly P8P67. Starting to kind of wish I'd saved up a few extra bucks to push for a slightly better motherboard.

[vesseblah]

This kind of bugs me... makes me wonder just how much I'll be able to upgrade with my measly P8P67. Starting to kind of wish I'd saved up a few extra bucks to push for a slightly better motherboard.

As mentioned above, the speed difference between 16x/16x and 8x/8x for SLI or Crossfire is rather minimal, usually well below 5%. FPS drop might be in 5-10% range if you go for really large resolutions like two or three 2560x1600 monitors. For normal users the difference between 16/16 and 8/8 GPU pair can be felt only in ePeen, not while gaming.

[DeltrusDisc]

You know when thinking about this, it really makes me wonder.... what's the point of this if you can't take full advantage of all of those, much use them all?

[Deleted]

You know when thinking about this, it really makes me wonder.... what's the point of this if you can't take full advantage of all of those, much use them all?

not all devices that use pci-e are graphics cards, or consume that much bandwith. what previously was mostly PCI(sound card, wireless network card, SATA controllers, USB hubs, you name it) lately has been much turned into pci-e, wether its 1x, 4x, 8x or 16x. they all fit in 16x slots.