Nvidia has released a patch that enables 8GT/s PCI-E
speeds for Intel's X79/SNB-E Sandy Bridge platforms.
GeForce GTX 680 and GTX 670 GPUs support PCI Express
3.0. However, some motherboard manufacturers have
released an updated SBIOS to enable the Intel X79/SNB-E
PCI Express 2.0 platform to run at up to 8GT/s bus
speeds.
Nvidia has tested GeForce GTX 680 and GTX 670 GPUs
across a number of X79/SNB-E platforms at 8GT/s bus
speeds, but has seen significant variation in signal
timing across different motherboards and CPUs. Therefore
the company decided to only support and guarantee PCI
Express 2.0 bus speeds on X79/SNB-E with its standard
release drivers.
Native PCI Express 3.0 platforms (like Ivy Bridge) will
run at 8GT/s bus speeds with Nvidia's standard release
drivers.
For all those who still want to enable 8GT/s speeds for
their X79/SNB-E, Nvidia has released the
force-enable-gen3.exe patch. It can be
used to manually enable faster 8GT/s bus speeds on GTX
680 or GTX 670 GPUs.
Users can also revert back to 5GT/s bus speeds by
running the following command from the DOS command line:
"force-enable-gen3.exe -revert"