14 DAY TRIAL // Even though every big shot, and small shot, on the IT market has been lauding and eulogizing the new and improved PCI Express Gen 3 standard, the technology is pretty much still totally useless.
The PCI Express Generation 3.0 technology is one of those advancements that everyone seemed to be very excited about.
The problem is that even the one video card that supports the new slots doesn't actually know what to do with it.
Either that, or there just isn't anything it can do with it in the first place.
After all, a new PCI Express interface means more bandwidth, and there is no way it will just magically improve the performance of graphics cards unless they are powerful enough but are limited by PCI Express 2.0.
It turns out that even the AMD Radeon HD 7970, which only just got released, gives no reason for anyone to run after Gen 3.0 as though it were the new ambrosia.
The folks at VR-Zone made that more than clear with their setup that relied on the ASUS Rampage IV Extreme, which has a BIOS option for changing PCI mode from 1.0 to 2.0 and even 3.0.
The 3DMark 11 benchmark was used for the test, the kind that heavily pushed the GPU compute and shader capabilities).
VR-Zone went ahead and put the card through the ComputeMark too.
There isn't another program that can easily claim to match the level of pressure that ComputeMark puts on the system bus.
The conclusion was that there is no point to PCI Express Gen 3.0 just yet, so people may as well take a pass on buying that new shiny motherboard and just get a boxload of RAM instead.
If anyone wants to learn more about the 28nm-based AMD Radeon HD 7970 graphics card, we covered the official product release here.