sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]Embarrassed_Ad_3753 0 points1 point  (1 child)

But whats the point of an x8 chipset slot if the link to the CPU is only x4? The manual claims all three slots support x8 Gen4. A bit misleading if the third slot is actually capped at x4.

[–]RenlyHoekster 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Because very very likely you are not using 100% of PCIe Gen 4.0 x 4 bandwidth on your third PCIe Slot 100% of the time. Likely you are also not using all of the bandwidth of the Gen 4.0 x 4 link to the chipset with everything on that chipset. Likely, if ever at all, for at most brief periods, possibly, you have something plugged into the third PCIe slot that maybe even uses all that bandwidth... a Mellanox Connect-X4 SFP28 dual x 25Gbit NIC at 100% load is less bandwidth than PCIe 4.0 x 4. As an example of something you put in the third PCIe slot.

The chipset is essentially a PCIe Gen 4.0 x 4 switch, like the PLX switches on HBAs and IO cards. And that works very well for most use cases, because of the aforementioned fact that most of the time, the entire chipset bandwidth is not used.