Dude, x8, x16 you are going to see zero difference. Here's some reading for you. The difference between a card on PCI 3 running at x16, x8 or x4 is completely negligible.
The only time and I do mean the ONLY TIME you would need an 'X' platform motherboard for SLI is if you were doing more than two cards, because Nvidia SLI requires a minimum x8 connection because... Nvidia.
Crossfire will actually work down to x4 on PCI 2.0 and the difference in performance there is still negligible at about 1% on average.
some of them are still open around me. 4 within 10 miles of each other i think. 12 miles is where i hit all 4 of them from where i am at. and all of them still carry random DIY stuff and are fun to poke through when looking for ideas.
Running at 8x won't impact performance in any meaningful way.
Still seeing bad frame rates over here! At a loss.
Thinking about trading two like new 970s for a 980
There are never enough fips.
didn't we warn you about that?
also just go for a Fury or Nano man, or maybe a water cooled 390X
https://pcpartpicker.com/part/gigabyte-video-card-gvr9furywf3oc4gd
and like current nvidia cards are a bad buy mostly because they don't seem capable of gaming any performance from DX12, and until the 980ti the AMD cards are generally going to be faster, especially at higher resolutions like 1440p, and then later on you get the boost from DX12.
in the recent hitman game a 390 was beating a 980ti in DX12.
Thats weird, at 1440p dual 970's should basicly scale pretty well in certain games.
What cpu do you have?
i5-4690k and yeah u all warned me but the 2nd card was a late night drunken impulse buy so.... BTWs , I'm using a old flexy sli bridge; should I fork up for one of those plastic $30 mongos or stick with wut I got?
hmm cpu should be fine.
thats odd, is the sli setup configerd properly? and does it even work?
Because if you realy get bad frames at dual 1440p, then i highly doubt that your sli config is working properly.
Actually, I only use one 2k monitor 2560* 1440 for gaming, the other is an older 1080 benq just for web or TV. Nvidia reports all is well but my frames say otherwise. There all over the place form 200 to 0 and BF4 reports skipped frames.
sli bridge could be an issue.
if you have a spare one, i would definitely check that.
rest of system specs?