Motherboards: Avoiding the Jargon.

[Saithes]

That doesn't make any sense to me at all... surely it would make more sense to have the main card at the higher bandwidth than the 2 cards supporting it?

It's amusing to go in sometimes to see whats changed (like the half of the store that was dedicated to printers and cables now being dedicated to TV's. Also to see that so many employee's outlast their managers apparntly the store I used to work at has had 19 different Store managers in the 2 years ater I left. (Funnily enough there was only 2 changes of store management while I was there...)

It does make sense. Sandybridge cannot sustain more than 22 PCI-E lanes by itself from the processor. The first two PCI-E slots are the 16x PCI-E lanes that are from the Processors on-die PCI-E controller so they are divided into x8/x8. When you move the cards down, it utilizes the nForce 200 bridge chip which extends the lanes another 24 resulting in x16/x16 for the 2 next slots following the first.

[Djinni]

It does make sense. Sandybridge cannot sustain more than 22 PCI-E lanes by itself from the processor. The first two PCI-E slots are the 16x PCI-E lanes that are from the Processors on-die PCI-E controller so they are divided into x8/x8. When you move the cards down, it utilizes the nForce 200 bridge chip which extends the lanes another 24 resulting in x16/x16 for the 2 next slots following the first.

Well when you lay it out like that then sure :-)