NVIDIA Releases PCI-Express 3.0 Patch For Intel X79 Sandy Bridge-E Platform

NVIDIA has finally released a patch allowing the GeForce GTX 670 and GTX 680 to run at PCI-Express 3.0 speeds on Intel’s X79 HEDT platform. Originally a number of motherboard manufacturers had released BIOS updates that enabled Intel’s X79 / Sandy Bridge-E platform to run at speeds of 8GT/s which are PCI Express 3.0 speeds. This of course didn’t change the fact that X79/SNB-E doesnt have Native PCI-Express 3.0 support and thus while NVIDIA may have enabled it, they do not support or guarantee anything but PCI-Express 2.0 bus speeds on X79/SNB-E. Those using Ivy Bridge systems with Z77 or certain Z68 motherboards support PCI Express 3.0 without issue as they have native support for it. With all that said, you can simple run an executable which can be found at the source below to force enable PCIe Gen 3 on X79/SNB-E, just remember its not officially supported or guaranteed to work according to NVIDIA. Should users wish to revert back to 5GT/s bus speeds they can simply run the following in DOS command line: force-enable-gen3.exe revert.