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ok, basically I want to invest in a good motherboard right now because I cant afford that Xpander device right now. So I figured a motherboard with the most expansion slots would be the best option on my current budget.
What Im curious about is some of these motherboards say PCI-E 16X but run at 8X. What does that mean exactly? I mean if the bus is 16 but only runs at 8 does that mean its not going to perform like a 16?

Also, can anybody recommend any good motherboards for me? My budget is right around $450.

any help is appreciated thanks.

Heh I was going to ask the same question to day. Some motherboards have one or two PCI-E 2.0 16x slots and other slots are 8x or 4x. Does this affect CUDA performance in Octane render? The 8x or 4x slots ?

Maryus3D wrote:Does this affect CUDA performance in Octane render? The 8x or 4x slots ?

No. The only thing that is affected is the initial transportation of data (geometry, textures) to the video ram on the card. Rendering speed is not affected by PCIe bandwith.

I'm happy with this one so far....


http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... =NF980-G65

Funnily enough one thing you need to check beforehand is how the pcie slots are distributed, cause even thou I've got 4 pcie slots I can hardly fit two cards since both of them take two slots (some 400 models take 3!) and being so close to each other doesn't help at all with the temperatures, and this 400 series (besides the 460) is pretty hot. Is a total bummer buying a 4 pcie capable mobo but only being able to use 2. Also like they said the pcie speed only affects at loading time, when the whole mesh is uploaded to the gpu, after that doesn't matter if its a 16x or a 2x.

A board like the one I posted leave the extra card slot blank specifically to fit the beefy GTX I have quite nicely. If three are going to be used I would definitely vent down the length (at one end at least) because it will get a little cramped. I currently have 2 GTX 260 cards and leave the center slot empty for the time being and my system runs very cool all around. Gotta' love those HAF CoolerMasters

mine are so close that they could be teenagers in love, keeping each other in heat all the time....

Hope to get this one someday.
http://gigabyte.com/products/product-pa ... id=3434#ov
Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD9 - it's about 500$ here.

It got 7 pcie (if you'll be able to use them all - you'll need a lot of psu's and pci riser cards)
X-es of PCIe matter only for throughput from processor/ram to gpu. Since rendering happens inside card the bus speed will affect only the loading time. And technically it is quite fast even at 1x

Edit: Also I'd prefer putting that case outdoors. Heat will probably evaporate snow falling on it before it short-circuits something(joke). Though my single card rises room temperature noticeably.

that's the mother of all motherboards, plus just to fit it and cool it with all slots filled you would need to use a fridge!