I've just read that somebody placed their Subwoofer onto their chassis/case and the motherboard went suicidal. The person then said to keep your Subwoofer away from EVERYTHING. I never knew that a Sub could cause stuff like this to happen! WTF? Now I'm getting nervous - I've got this Logitech setup on the way, so what do you recommend I do with the Subwoofer?

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/94472

Damnit. OK, forget that link, both the 680i and 780i chipsets are using 2 16X PCI-E lanes. My bad.

As/Still am a regular bit-tech reader, I DEFINETLY remember reading an article ages ago on bit-tech that compared a variety of chipsets with different PCI-E lanes (X8, X16) using SLI. One example was with a mobo using two 16X PCI-E lanes and another mobo with 1 16X PCI-E lane and 8X lane. They used the 7900GTX or something and BOTH mobos performed the same, with the 16/16 lane actually performing slightly worse in some cases. Games such as FEAR, Prey, and others were used in the benchmark. I swear that this is true - I'm actually trying to find the article now, but no luck so far. I hope that somebody else can remember this. Now, this might have changed - I'm sure it probably has - but it was pretty clear in that article's conclusion that the PCI-E lane speed didn't make a difference.

Like I said, I might get another 8800 somewhere down the line when it's far cheaper, but even then I doubt it. So can somebody actually answer my questions please? Instead of laughing at me like the above poster decided to do....

? Somewhere down the line I might get another 8800GTS 512.

My spec:

AMD X2 4600

2GB Corsair 800mz

Gigabyte GA-M57-SLI

WD 250GB 7200 16

Samsung 20X DVD/RW

Also, I have another question. My mobo has 1 PCI-E 16X lane and 8X lane. Would I really see a performance benefit by getting on of the new chipsets with both PCI-E lanes @ 16X? Not that I probably would pick up one of these, but I'm just curious. Well, if you look at this, I guess that extra 16X lane doesn't make any difference at all.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2008/01/10/xfx_nforce_780i_sli/6

Finally, some people might cry "bottleneck!" but isn't a bottleneck only like 3-5FPS drain? If I do get a bottleneck, how much FPS will I be losing?

is it really worth upgrading from a 8600gt already?_Pedro_

Uhhh yes. If you're one of the people with low/mid-range GPUs, then you'd really be able to see how old your card is getting. My X1950Pro is still a very good card (in ye olde days, it was plain sick), but I'm looking forward to an upgrade to a high-end card.

^yes, although SLI that would be pretty expensive to the point that it would be better to just get a HD 3870 X2, filmography

Problem is, 1 3870X2 falls behind 1 8800GTS 512 in Crysis, so, you know... man this is bugging me.