PCI Cards: Do you remember? Do you use any now?

[WantoN]

In the days of yore we had all sorts of PCI cards; from soundcards to serial ports we took pride in posting pictures of our full to the brim desktops, basking in the glory of all that extra flexibility and functionality.

Modern times however, have mostly seen the demise of these once glorious devices, along with floppies, FireWire and the once ubiquitous CD-ROM. With highly specced motherboards and remarkably decent onboard audio, the standardisation of the USB port and the true powerhouses that PCs have become, it’s rare to see a build with anything but a (ridiculously powerful, comparably) discrete GPU.

However, I sense a resurgence on the horizon. NVME drives mounted on PCI-E adapters, the desperate need for MOAR PORTS from VR, desktop DACs, external drives and wonderous peripherals. Could this be the age of the PCI-E card once again?

So chaps, what wonderous devices did you rock back in the day? And do you use any PCI-E cards now? Am I mad for hoping that we might again see towers stacked to the gills with all that glorious fibreglass and copper?

 

[WantoN]

I remember when I replaced my 28k modem with a 56k, the speeds blew my mind.

I actually have quite a few cards in at the moment, an m.2 heatsink, a plate I knocked up for external fan control, and a 7 port USB3 card. Going to be getting a type C + 3.1 gen2 card too I reckon.

 

[WantoN]

I did have dodgy on-board ethernet in my last PC so I put a cheap network card in it. The performance from the network card was very good, I think there's still benefit from having network cards even though most people don't bother.

Especially with 10Gb, it’s a necessity.

How about we get some pictures of you PCI and PCI-E pron, gents?

I’ll upload one later.

 

[WantoN]

The firewire card is absent at the point this picture was taken. I've been considering putting my GTX 780 back in to act as a cuda processor and physx processor too. I'd also like to have 10Gbe at some point but the switches are still a little on the expensive side.


The old xonar card with daughter board and the AJA framstore.


The odd arrangement with the sas expander is due to the old 790FX motherboard not having enough PCIe slots of sufficient length left to fit the card into the board. (it's got two x16 slots, three x1 slots and then two pci)

Glorious mate. I’ll post mine as soon as I can.