They are talking about going from a 2 card setup on a P45 motherboard to an X48 motherboard the P45 only supports one 16x or two 8x where as the X48 supports two 16x lanes. The performance gain is less because PCIE 2.0 is double the bandwidth of the old PCIE
My guess would be that it's only 5% because whatever benchmark they're using (I haven't read the article) is now being limited by the CPU or some other system and not the graphics capabilities.
a) the article is about the gain going from 1x to 2x video cards b) the 5% gain is for differences amongst motherboard chipsets; it is separate from the gain from the sli itself.
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How is four video cards equal to only 5% performance gain?
Could it be that Crossfire isn't as good as SLI?
Most likely I'd assume the heat in the middle two would slow them down just a bit, but what do I know about SLI/Crossfire
They are talking about going from a 2 card setup on a P45 motherboard to an X48 motherboard
the P45 only supports one 16x or two 8x where as the X48 supports two 16x lanes.
The performance gain is less because PCIE 2.0 is double the bandwidth of the old PCIE
My guess would be that it's only 5% because whatever benchmark they're using (I haven't read the article) is now being limited by the CPU or some other system and not the graphics capabilities.
As you scale from 2->3->4 cards the performance gain decreases. And the performance gain from going from 4 4850s to 4 4870s would be about 5%.
Also, Crossfire scales better than SLI
Without reading the article, I would assume the 5% performance difference refers to the chipsets (ie. P45
a) the article is about the gain going from 1x to 2x video cards
b) the 5% gain is for differences amongst motherboard chipsets; it is separate from the gain from the sli itself.
try reading the article before you comment on whatever picture engadget opts to put to an article.
"greater-than-sign-that-ends-comment"X48), not the crossfire setups.