GTX 980 sli or 970 sli for an old system?

Eralma

Obliviot
Hello, I would like to take advantage of all the experts surrounding this site so I can get an opinion. Sorry if is not the place to. I have an old Asus Formula III (x58, PCI express 2.0) with an i7 990x OC to 4.3 Ghz and 12 G of RAM at 1600 Mhz, I am planning to get the Asus ROG Swift and given that the CPU is not the bottleneck but the PCI express 2.0 might affect performance, is it worth to sli 2 custom GTX 980 to feed the monitor with 120 FPS? Or it would be better to get 2 custom 970? or my system is too old for that monitor and GPU's? (sorry for my English, it’s not my native language)
 

madmat

Soup Nazi
You could get the twin 980's now and later upgrade to a board that supports your CPU while bringing PCIe 3 to the party. Surely there's a newer motherboard out there that will allow you to keep the CPU.
 

madmat

Soup Nazi
After looking into your CPU I see it's socket 1366 which has been pretty much abandoned. The good news is that from what I've read, you only see a marginal difference between PCIe 2.0 and 3.0 In the tests I examined the differences were actually in line with the difference in IPC between the CPU's used to test them. The CPU's used were both 3.0ghz but the one that supported PCIe 3.0 was 4%-6% more efficient in terms of IPC (instructions per clock) than the one used on the PCIe 2.0 test bed and that was the difference they saw in testing. They were getting 4%-6% improvements in FPS in the games tested. The reality is that you'll see less than 1-2 FPS difference in GPU intensive games by sticking with your current gear.

In short, I still say go for it.
 

Eralma

Obliviot
Thank you Madmat, that's the answer that I was waiting for! he he I didn't want to upgrade the cpu/mobo and for 1 o 2 frames you are right it is not wort it.

I really appreciate the time to research my issue, I thing for me it would be hard to find that kind of info given my limited knowledge,

Thank you very much!
 
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