14 DAY TRIAL // Motherboard maker Gigabyte has recently announced that most of its 6 series LGA 1155 solutions for Intel processors offer native support for the PCI Express 3.0 standard as well for the upcoming Ivy Bridge processors, after performing a simple BIOS update.
Gigabyte has posted the BIOS files required on its website and these cover all of the company's Z68, P67, H67 and H61 motherboards, but, rather surprisingly, Q67 based solutions were left out of the equation.
“Wanting to provide maximum upgradeability to customers, Gigabyte has enabled native support for PCI Express Gen. 3 across the entire range of Gigabyte 6 series motherboards, including the recently launched G1.Sniper 2 motherboard, when paired with Intel's next generation 22nm CPUs.
“By installing the latest BIOS for their 6 series motherboards today, users can be assured they are ready to take advantage of all the performance enhancements tomorrow's technologies have to offer,” reads the company's press release.
Gigabyte recommends its users to updated the BIOS with the help of the @BIOS applications, which is available for download from here.
According to information provided by ASRock, all current 6-series motherboards should offer support for PCI Express 3.0, unless lane switching is involved as this requires the switches used to be PCI Express 3.0 compliant.
The PCI Express 3.0 standard was published in November of 2010, and it doubles the bandwidth available to devices using it, from 500MB/s per lane in each direction for PCIe Gen 2 to 1GB/s per lane in each direction.
As a result, a PCI Express x16 Gen 3 slot can provide a total bandwidth of 32GB/s, compared to the 16GB/s available to a similar Gen 2 slot.
No other motherboard manufacturer has announced that its current Intel 6 series solutions offer native PCI Express 3.0 support, but things will most definitely change in the not so distant future.