PCI 3.0 requires Ivy Bridge

After getting my motherboard replaced I have learned that the new PCI 3.0 standard will require an Ivy Bridge or better CPU. This is something that I have not seen advertised on any websites yet so I thought I'd share it here.

When DS had to replace my mobo they used the new Gen 3 board for the P8Z68 V-pro and on the top right corner of the box for the mobo it says "Full PCIe 3.0 performance requires a 22nm CPU"

That means to get the full speed performance out of either the ATI 7000 series, or the soon to be release Nvidia 600 series, people are also going to need to wait or upgrade to the Ivy Bridge chips. The Ivy Bridge chips should be out around the same time as the 600 series.

I figured I'd give people a heads up on this so they can plan accordingly, since as I said I have not seen any retail sites being up front with this info. PCIe 3.0 cards like the 7970 or 670 will work with out an Ivy Bridge chip but their performance will be limited to PCIe 2.0 bandwidth speeds.

I know Alex said they are going to try and do more with the configuration page in order to notify people when they select conflicting hardware so hopefully they can some how post this information as well when the Ivy Bridge chips come out. So that way if someone chooses a Sandy Bridge chip, but then selects a 7000 series or 600 series card a pop-up or something can be displayed recommending they switch to an Ivy Bridge chip.

Interesting find, thank you for sharing, I'll see how we can add this to our soon to be validation feature on our configurator.

It will be nice to see new benchmark reviews after this comes out. The results will more accurately reflect the performance of the 600 and 7000 series graphics cards. Some review sites are still testing with first generation i7 chips and the false numbers are starting to show.