Asus motherboard uses PEX 8613 PCIe Gen 2 switch

It is being used to support the necessary bandwidth and fan-out required by Asus's latest high-end technology.

The PLX switch enables the P7P55D Premium to provide system design flexibility by using the PEX 8613 switch to act as a reliable high-performance bridge between the Intel P55 chipset and high-speed Gen 2 input/output (I/O) endpoints that include multiple expansion slots and SATA 6Gb/s ports.

The PLX Expresslane PEX 8613 is a low-power PCIe Gen 2 switch that offers 12 lanes and three ports, as well as a scalable high-bandwidth interconnection to a variety of designs and applications.

Any port can be independently configured for different I/O speeds, whether PCIe Gen 1 (2.5GT/s) or Gen 2 (5.0 GT/s), thus allowing a Gen 1 central processing unit or endpoints to 'talk' to Gen 2 devices and vice-versa.

Although any Gen 2 device can down-train to Gen 1, resulting in one half of the bandwidth, the PLX PCIe Gen 2 switches preserve the full Gen 2 performance by matching X number of Gen 2 lanes with 2X the number of Gen 1 lanes.

Using the PLX PEX 8613 switch as a bridge, P7P55D Premium was able to connect two Gen 2 lanes on the SATA 6Gb/s endpoint to four Gen 1 lanes on the Intel P55 chipset.

This flexibility can be found in all PLX PCIe Gen 2 switches, thus allowing designers to take advantage of the newest and highest-performance solutions, while simultaneously accommodating legacy designs.

The newly released Asus P7P55D Premium motherboard features true SATA 6Gb/s motherboard access and many more innovations in over-clocking support, cooling and power efficiency.

The P7P55D Premium offers users freedom of choice in multi-GPU execution by use of either AMD CrossfireX or NVIDIA SLI graphics cards.

It is based on Intel's P55 chipset and supports Intel's Lynnfield-based Core I5 and Core I7 processors.