IO Level up - should I go to PCI/E x8 for SATA 6GB/s?

D

daedal

Gawd
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May 10, 2005
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Howdy folks,

I've built myself a brand new rig. One of the features on my ASUS P7P55D-E LX motherboard is something called "IO Level Up" which downplays the PCI-E port from x16 to x8 (at least, that's my understanding of it - please enlighten me if I'm wrong).

By doing so, this should allow me to use my SATA3 drive (WD Caviar Black) to its advertised 6GB/s speeds, rather than the default 3GB/s.

My question is: will this greatly affect video performance? I do quite a bit of file transfer from my small SSD to my large SATA 3 drive so a speed increase there would be great, but I don't want to suffer for it either.

[EDIT] I couldn't notice a visible drop in framerate when toggled.
 
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I don't thin you'll notice much difference between 3gb/s and 6gb/s on a WD Caviar Black
 
With 1 standard physical (spinning) hard drive, you'll never reach anywhere near the saturation point of a 3.0 Gbits/s connection, let alone 6 Gbits/s.

You won't notice a difference either way.
 
Changing that will have little (if any) impact on 3D performance... And zero impact (positive or negative) on disk access speed. A useless (for now) feature. Sata3 enabled SSD's will change this... eventually.
 
Thanks, guys. I left it in 6GB/s SATA mode for now. I did notice that transferring larges files from my SSD to the HDD was going at around 180mb/s, but I hadn't tried it in 3GB/s mode.
 
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