I want to get a PCIe M.2 SSD but I heard that this will take lanes from the GPU. The PCIe M.2 SSD will take a x8 lane on my motherboard which will change my GPU's lane from x16 to a x8. I would like to know if making the GPU only have a x8 slot will affect the performance, and if so, is it worth the performance loss having the 1.8 Gbps on the SSD for Windows boot time and game loads.
It shouldn't make a significant difference, I run one or both my GPUs in 8x and I can't tell any difference between 16 and 8.
Sounds good. Thanks for the help.
Also note that SLI runs it at 8x and AMD crossfire hasn't even experienced performance degradation at 4x which they would not do if it meant a performance degradation, you're completely fine. I run my single 970 at 8x (Reasons, don't ask) and I still score 2800 in valley with my bench OC.
Just out of interest, what m.2 are you getting that uses 8 lanes? That's quite some bandwidth!
Regardless, I've seen tons of benchmarks regarding x8 and x16 of gen 3 pcie, and even with a card like the titan x, you still get 95% (minimum) of the performance..
og titan:
http://anandtech.com/show/7089/geforce-gtx-titan-twoway-sli-scaling-pcie-2-vs-pcie-3
Thank you so much. These charts are extremely helpful. And it's the G-Skill Phoenix Blade, I believe I read it's x8