PCI Express 3.0 Specification Coming in Late 2010

[zulman89]

PCI Express 3.0 needed to support three slot video cards needing 300W of power

With the number of video cards on the market that still don’t support PCI Express 2.0, it’s hard to imagine the need for PCI Express (PCIe) 3.0 at this time. Despite the fact that relative few cards support PCIe 2.0, the PCI-SIG announced this week that it expects the specifications for PCIe 3.0 to be complete by 2010.

Not only will PCIe 3.0 offer a massive amount of data throughput at 8 gigatransfers per second, but according to ExtremeTech the new specification is needed to support future video cards that utilize three slots and consume 300W of power. To put that power consumption number in perspective consider that the current NVIDIA 9800 GX2 with dual GPUs consumes a relatively paltry 197W of power.

The good news is that PCIe 3.0 won’t require a new slot so your PCIe 2.0 cards will fit and work fine thanks to backwards compatibility. Only the electrical specifications differ between PCIe 2.0 and 3.0.

The new triple slot cards consuming 300W of power will also require a new power connector from the power supply of the PC. The new connector will be 2x4 (apparently higher-power than the 2x4 connectors in use now) rather than the current common 2x3. The big question surrounding three slot cards in my mind is how exactly I will fit them in my gaming PC.

Put a pair of dual slot 9800 GX2’s inside a current system with say a 790i mainboard and you hardly have room for anything else. When you start looking at 3-way SLI with these new three slot cards you need nine total expansion slots for video cards alone. My Cooler Master Cosmos S only has 7 expansion slots total.

From a gamers perspective the triple slot cards are sure to significantly outperform what we have now and we won’t need to throw out our PCIe 2.0 cards, but you will need a new PSU and case at least. The other thing a three slot card makes me wonder about is if mainboards will grow into something more like the extended ATX size or larger simply to allow you to run these behemoth video cards and still have room for expansion cards.

If three video cards can consume 900W of power alone, we may be looking at the age of 2KW or higher power supplies being fairly common. Or perhaps we will see cases like the new NZXT Kahos that can hold dual power supplies being much more common.

source ;

http://www.dailytech.com/PCI+Express+30+Specification+Coming+in+Late+2010/article12069.html