SLI on Sandy Bridge: Performance Review
Sandy Bridge brings an awful lot of new things into the desktop computer market. Aside from thechange in their characteristics that proves to be appealing to most users but on the other hand might be frustrating for overclockers (read over Sandy Bridge overclocking article to find out why) and the collection of useful new features, in our Sandy Bridge performance review, we also found out that these processors are also remarkably fast compared to older CPUS.
Now, it would be interesting to see how far a Sandy Bridge processor could go when it comes to gaming performance, especially in the resource-demanding, multi-GPU scenarios. That was precisely what we had in mind when we started writing this article. Here, you can see how well would a multi-GPU configuration scale up on a Sandy Bridge system. Our findings are rather interesting, but first, let’s take a look at the inner workings of a Sandy Bridge system.
According to the picture describing its Block Diagram above, a Sandy Bridge processor accepts a maximum bandwidth of 16GB/s from the PCI Express lanes. When two graphics cards are installed (on a P67-based system), that number splits down to 8 GB/s each (lane configuration: 8×8). Compared to Intel’s previous platform, the X58 (socket 1366/ Tylersburg) that supports a maximum PCI-E bandwidth of 32x (in 2x 16 or 4×8 lane configuration), Sandy Bridge’s technical specification is far behind, at least on paper.
However, a closer look reveals a fundamental difference between P67’s (Sandy Bridge) and X58’s basic designs. On the X58, the PCI-Express controller is located on the chipset, while on the Sandy Bridge, that controller resides inside the processor, thus (theoretically) minimizing latency as data won’t need to travel through the chipset before reaching the processor. Still, fact remains that the Sandy Bridge has fewer maximum bandwidth support. Could the integrated PCI-E controller compensate that problem?
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