PCI-E

[Shakey_Jake33]

For a Conroe mobo, I was planning to get the DFI nForce590 board, mainly because it has a pleasing amount of PCI slots considering so many boards seem to be dropping them for PCI-E x1.

But some things have been bothering me...

1) Does anything actually use PCI-E x1? I can't think of anything, but are we expecting a sudden upsurge which would see me buying a new board soon?

2) Between the 2 PCI-E x16 SLI slots on that board are 2 different slots I don't recognise. What are they? I'm assuming even more different forms of PCI-E?!

 

[semi-pro waster]

1) Short answer is not too much at the moment. That is/will be changing, there are a couple of TV tuners I believe and a few other miscellaneous cards(maybe some variant of the PhysX cards? but pointless either way). I wouldn't worry greatly about it as most features of add-in cards are implemented directly onto motherboards now e.g. firewire, sound, lan, Raid etc. The add-in cards are usually better but it does come down to what you pay for and most of the time if people need an add-in card they only need one or two so the PCI bus can cope.

2) Without looking at the specifications from the picture I'd go with something like PCI-E 2x and 4x or 8x as a guess. PCI-E just chains 'lanes' together effectively so the longer the slot is the more lanes it has and therefore more bandwidth.

 

[Shakey_Jake33]

Brill, cheers. Just seemed wierd, while I don't really keep up with computer hardware as much as some, it seemed odd so many board manufacturers were dropping PCI in favour of PCI-E x1 when I'd yet to really hear much of anything use x1 (much less x2, x4 or whatever, though those are rendered un-usable on that board because of the GPU cooler).

True, I only need PCI for my X-Fi these days...