high bandwidth PCIE2.0 Motheroard

Hi,

I would need some advice for a PCIE2.0, 2 16x slot motherboard. I would need a cpu-gpu-cpu bandwidth as high as possible.

Please put your recomandations here, or just configurations that give good results for you.

Thanks,
Bogdan

Anything recent, like X38 or newer on the Intel side and 780a/790FX on the AMD side (I don’t keep very up to date on AMD chipsets), will do fine, but X58+Nehalem does extremely well with both pinned and unpinned transfers.

This motherboard:

[url=“Support for Intel® Desktop Board DX58SO”]Intel® NUC Products

Updating it with the latest BIOS gets you DDR3-1866 support, which should give you some serious host-device bandwidth (along with the X58 northbridge)

RAM speed has no impact (as far as I’ve seen) on pinned memory transfers.

Really? So it’s all just limited by the speed of the northbridge (the speed of the PCI express ↔ CPU bus)? If so, then getting an “Extreme Edition” Core i7 chip should make for somewhat faster transfers, since the interconnect runs 33% faster on those chips than the standard processors.

QPI speed makes even less of a difference on transfer performance. RAM speed makes an impact on paged memory transfers (since it’s a CPU memcpy + DMA), but the results I have on my wall show the extra QPI getting you about 100MB/s or so on paged memory transfers (regardless of what the memory speed is, which is interesting).