2 Graphic cards and 1 PCI SSD on PCI-E 2.0 x16

Question

I wanna get 2 graphic cards (to support more than 4 monitors) and an Revo PCI SSD.

Now, they all need PCI-E 2.0 x16.

But all the mainboards I look at say this something like this:
3x PCI-E 2.0 x16 (x16/x16 or x16/x8/x8 SLI/CFX), 2x PCI-E x1, 1x PCI
5x PCI-E 2.0 x16 (x16/x16 or x16/x8/x8 CFX/4-Way-SLI), 1x PCI-E x1

Does that mean that I can either have 2 times an x16 card or or one x16 and two x8? Or that the x16 card just works with half the power if I put it into the x8?

Or did I completely miss the point here?

My last self made PC was back in the times of AGB...

Answer 1

The multiplier depends on how many cards you have fitted, so in your first example you could run 2 cards at x16, but if you fitted a third card then the second two slots would run at x8 max.

Thought I'd better add that some motherboards allow you to alter the PCI-E multiplier configuration in the BIOS.

Answer 2

If you just Want 4 Monitors then you dont need 2 GFX cards.

There are reasonably proceed card like this or these ones . Those series support 4 monitors per card and the processing power and ram vary depending on models.

Similar technology is used on some high end cards but only support 3 monitors. Some more expensive ones will support 4.

Using SATA-3 should be more than enough for using an SSD drive, so the PCI-E is not really a massive advantage unless you are raiding 6 SSD's nad need more than 600mb/s!

On many motherboards it it not possible to have more than 2 Full PCI-E cards running at full speed. To achieve that you will need to look into server motherboards with dual processes that have 4-8 PCI-E slots and dedicated buses and ram.

But this board is the closest non-server board that you could use, but you will notice in the spec sheet that the bandwidth does fall when using all slots.