The Intel Core i7-5820K chip to come with fewer PCI-E lanes

The arrival of the Intel Haswell-E processors, the X99 platform and DDR4 memory has been eagerly awaited lately and hardware enthusiasts have just a week more to get the latest and hottest PC hardware there is. Thanks to this intense interest we now know what we will be getting on August 29 but unfortunately some things will not be as rosy as they seem now.

We are talking about the Core i7-5820K chip of the Haswell-E generation. This chip will come with fewer PCI-E lanes than its bigger brothers and the exact number will be 28, down from 40 lanes in the i7-5930K and i7-5960X chips. The information is not official just yet, but it comes from motherboard makers so we assume they know what they are talking about.

Well, what will be the effect of these 28 lanes? We will tell you – on motherboards with three PCI-E 3.0 x16 slots, the i7-5930K and i7-5960X will allow you to run two slots at x16 speeds and a third slot at x8. Systems with the i7-5820K will allow you to operate a graphics card at x16 speed on the first slot, at x8 on the second and at x4 speed on the third slot. On boards with four slots, one of them will be incapable of offering bandwidth. Still, the i7-5820K may not be that bad of a chip if you do not intend to run more than two graphics cards. In addition to that you get six cores with Hyper-Threading for 12 threads at once, 12 MB of L3 cache and a quad-channeled DDR4 memory controller for around USD 400 (presumably) and for some people this might be an excellent deal given they get the latest hardware, wrapped in the fastest Intel platform as of now.

We will know more on August 29 (or sooner) when the new platform will be officially unveiled.

Source: Tom’s Hardware