[Solved] What's a pcie 3.0 controller?

actually the reason they say about the pci-e 3.0


is bassically all the motherboards that have pci-e 3.0 support ivy bridge cpu's


ivy bridge uses the same slot as sandy bridge but not all motherboards will support the new cpu's


most if not all the ones with pci-e 3.0 should support it. if i had know before i bought motherboard about this i would have paid more money to get one with pci-e 3.0

So no need to get an ivy bridge? my motherboard has 3.0 slots, its an asrock extreme 7 gen 3

Physically the slots by themself are identical between PCIe 1.0 2.0 and 3.0.
The CPU provides 16 lanes of PCIe, which a MB could have wired to a single x16 slot or to 2 x16 slots (I'm talking physical slot, not electrical). In the latter case (2 x16), 8 lanes are connected straight to the 1st slot while the other 8 go to some switching chips to "duplicate" them to both slots (1st- lanes 9-16, 2nd- lanes 1-8). The chip will detect wether the 2nd slot is populated and route the signals to only one slot.
What they say with the "gen 3" and "PCIe 3.0" support is that the traces of the signals and the switching chips have been tested and certified for PCIe 3.0. A non-gen3 MB could have too much electrical noise to be able to pass PCIe 3.0 frequencies/signal.
So with a SandyBridge CPU, you will not have ANY 3.0 capabilities. With an IvyBridge CPU you will have 1 x16 or 2 x8 PCIe 3.0 capable slots (which currently only the Radeon 79x0 can use). All other slots are still 2.0 and are connected to the MB chip.

PS: the MB-to-card connections will always use the common capabilities. So a 2.0 MB will work with a 3.0 GPU, but the latter will use the common 2.0.

It is the next generation of LGA1155 processors will feature PCI-Express 3.0 bus to connect with graphics cards, and provide double bandwidth over PCI- Express 2.0.