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"