Where does everyone here go in search of motherboards?
I'm in need of an AMD64 motherboard that has 2 16x pci express slots.
All the usual places I go to don't have any =/
There's no such thing. As far as I'm aware, the only board with 2 16x PCIe slots is the one included in Dell's XPS 600 Intel system. I'm not sure they even work with anything other than running 2 graphics cards over SLI. Then again, I don't think there's too many other kinds of cards that connect to 16x PCIe.
I know of a bunch of P4 based boards with 2 16x PCIe slots.
A friend of mine bought one and is currently using only 1 of the slots.
Since 2 cards will give you double(in theory) performance, it seems like a good investment. If you're game is running at 15fps, get an identical card and beef it up to 30.
Course no current games(hl2 sorta) take advantage of this but I'm sure that anything under the unreal3 engine will.
Er, what? "No such thing"..? SLI boards have been the talk of the market for a few months now, at least. I am, of course, presuming that you're not looking to buy an OEM system, just the bare hardware.
Having 2 16x slots and two GPUs in SLI can offer up to twice the performance, but your mileage will vary.
That said, you asked for an AMD64 board with two 16x PCIe slots. The boards from DFI are quite popular with the gamers, being good value and high performance.
>"No such thing"..? SLI boards have been the talk of the market for a few months now, at least.
Yes. The vast majority of SLI boards use either one PCIe connector running at 16x for single-card operation, or two PCIe connectors running at 8x for SLI operation. I would imagine that motherboards that can run both connectors at 16x simultaneously are quite rare at this time.
All PCIe video cards run at 16x regardless if they're sli or not.
DFI seems to do the job... though a lil expensive >.>
It's a limitation of the quantity of physical PCIe lanes available to the video card(s). Many current-generation motherboards, even the SLI ones, have around 20 PCIe lanes. That leaves 16 lanes for graphics and about 4 lanes for other stuff (usually 1xPCIe or 4xPCIe slots).
When two video cards are connected over SLI, they share the 16 lanes normally available for a single video card. That effectively cuts the maximum bandwidth of each card down to 8xPCIe, regardless of what the cards themselves were designed to run at.
That said, PCIe is hell-fast. 16x is about four gig a second. AGP 8x is only 2.1gig a second, and I understand that most of that is never used as well. I wouldn't be worried about running SLI with two 8x slots.