At the launch of Intel's LGA-2011 based Sandy Bridge E CPU we finally had a platform capable of supporting PCI Express 3.0, but we lacked GPUs to test it with. That all changed this past week as we worked on our review of the Radeon HD 7970, the world's first 28nm GPU with support for PCIe 3.0. The move to PCIe 3.0 increases per-lane bandwidth from 500MB/s to 1GB/s. For a x16 slot that means doubling bandwidth from 8GB/s under PCIe 2.1 to 16GB/s with PCIe 3.0. As we've seen in earlier reviews and our own internal tests, there's hardly any difference between PCIe 2.1 x8 and x16 for modern day GPUs. The extra bandwidth of PCIe 3.0 wasn't expected to make any tangible difference...