StormX2

eww
that is a terrible design....

those PCIE are soo close together

and whats he deal with 2 8x and 2 16 x??

in order to xfire 2 16x youneed to put one on top PCIE and one on bottom blocking out the PCI slot??

and at that point wouldnt you lose some performance since the data has to travel further from that bottom PCIE? or is it so minimal that it just doesnt mater.

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Sikozu

Well for one you can't sli on this board as it does not have the NF200 chips on it.

Cards with single slot coolers will be able to fit in their in a four way configuration. Ie 4x 4850's.

The deal with the 2 8x and the 2 16x is that the northbridge simple doesnt have the pci-e lanes to do four 16x pci-e 2.0 lanes. That would be 64 lanes but the x58 northbridge only has like 56.

Dont forget is a 8x pci-e 2.0 slot, or effectivly a 16x pci-e 1.1 slot so there wont be any bandwidth issues. Only when you drop down to a 4x pci-e 2.0 slot on new high end cards will there be a bandwidth issue.

There isnt a performance drop from having that last one "so far away".

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Halo2Vista

i don't know why gigabyte does that, where the PCI-e slots are all close together, when most people have dual slot cards and it blocks a slot for other components, not that people really use all 4 slots, but it's kind of nice to have some space.

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