In short, I'd like to maximise the bandwidth available for the usb3 chipset. While using a gpu in the pcie 16x slot, I would still like the usb3 to operate at its "Super speed". This is because I'd like to be able to use a usb3 hdmi capture card (the blackmagic intensity shuttle), which would need to run at more than the crippled "half speed".
As mentioned on this xbit review:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/mainboards/display/gigabyte-ga-h55n-usb3_6.htmlThe usb3 chipset currently switches to using a slower pcie generation 1 lane when the 16 lanes of the pciex slot are being used, reference in the top left of this image from that review:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/mainboards/gigabyte-ga-h55n-usb3/scheme.pngIs there an option, or could we have an option, to force the pciex slot to run at 8x in the motherboard options? This would leave 8 lanes available, plenty to allow the usb3 to run at full speed again, with a neglible speed impact on the pciex slot itself.
Some other motherboards by gigabyte allow you to do this, and use the word "superspeed" in the bios to let you choose it:
one way is Turbo mode where it uses PCI-E lanes to communicate directly with the CPU for best performance. The other way is through the P55 chipset where it is limited to PCI-E gen 1 speed (2.5Gb/s) – when turbo mode is disabled. The point is that Gigabyte P55A boards are all about options: we provide options for the user to decide if he wants 5Gb/s SSUSB for high-speed backup or if he prefers SLI/CFX while still enjoying USB/SATA 3.0 – albeit at a lower speed. And in auto mode the system will decide for the user, i.e. if there is a 2nd VGA card then SLI/CF takes precedence, but if there is only 1 VGA card and a device is plugged into a USB/SATA 3.0 slot then superspeed data transfer takes precedence.
(source:
http://www.overclockers.com/usb-30-testing-gigabyte-ud3r-ud6/ )
Could we please have a similar option to above, where we run our pci-ex slot lower, in order to still have full speed usb3 connectivity?
Because I run a i7, I don't have the option of using integrated graphics.
