PCI vs. PCI-Express sound cards

SlyReaper · 12 May 2008 at 20:05

My motherboard only has 2 PCI-E slots. One is blocked off by my graphics card cooler, the other is very very close to my northbridge heatsink, so much so that I don't think a long card would fit in the slot.

I do have plenty of PCI slots though. Is there any disadvantage to using a PCI sound card instead of a PCI-E one?

Greenlizard0 · 12 May 2008 at 20:12

I don't think so at this point - but with older longer PCI slots becoming less and less on motherboards now it's a case of future proofing.

The Xonar for example needs an additional power plug as well since PCI-E doesn't give enough so that might be something to think of as well just incase you don't have a spare.

SlyReaper · 12 May 2008 at 20:27

But a long PCI slot does deliver enough power?

I was originally going to get a xonar DX, but as I said, I'm not certain it will fit in the available slot. So it looks like the xonar D2 might be the one to go for.

Anyway, even if the card does require extra power, can't you get molex -> whatever power adaptors for it?

Greenlizard0 · 12 May 2008 at 20:30

You should be able to - it's only a 4 pin floppy power cable it needs - so chances are your PSU should have a spare one

SlyReaper · 12 May 2008 at 20:36

Okay, final question: how much bandwidth does a PCI slot have compared to that of a PCI-E slot? And do sound cards use all of it?

dave-lew99 · 12 May 2008 at 20:49

It's hardly worth worrying about - i have a professional studio card at the office and it can handle 96 channels at 24-bit/96Khz on a single PCIe x1 card, the same system is also available with a normal PCI card.

Stonedofmoo · 13 May 2008 at 08:26

SlyReaper said:
Okay, final question: how much bandwidth does a PCI slot have compared to that of a PCI-E slot? And do sound cards use all of it?

All PCI slots use a shared PCI BUS with a bandwidth of 133MB/s iirc, whereas a PCI-E x1 slot has a dedicated bandwidth of 250MB/s in both directions simultaneously. So assuming it was maxing out in both directions at once it could transfer 500MB/s, which is 4x more than PCI can manage at it's very best.

dave-lew99 · 13 May 2008 at 17:39

From the above numbers, a PCIe x1 card can theoretically manage 1,736 audio channels at 24bit/96khz, so no, no sound card makes full use of the bandwidth.

The real advantage of the high bandwidth is that when you have other devices sharing theres less chance of bottlenecking issues - this mainly used to be an issue on multi channel studio cards sharing the PCI buss with graphics cards.