Future of PCI-E?

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Brahmzy

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Sep 9, 2004
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Hey all, I'm building a new box. I need to know what versions of PCI-E I should buy. I'm probably just going to get a 7900GT for now, but when the DX10 cards come out with Vista, I don't want to have to buy a new mobo.

Thanks.
 
pci-e is just that, pci-e? the next gen cards should all be pci-e as well, so any mobo that has a 16x pci-e slot.. should support any of the new cards? ;)
 
There are no immediate plans (to my knowledge) of releaseing a new type of PCIe slot that will render existing video cards unuseable. However, that may change at any time - but don't worry about it.
 
^^^This is what I was meaning^^^ Similar to AGP 4X, 8X etc.

How close are we to saturating the PCI-E 16X bandwidth with the current GTX's n XTX's?
 
Brahmzy said:
^^^This is what I was meaning^^^ Similar to AGP 4X, 8X etc.

How close are we to saturating the PCI-E 16X bandwidth with the current GTX's n XTX's?
Click to expand...

Not very. Shit, I doubt those cards would hardly saturate AGP 8x if they were available in such a flavor. PCIe 16x has a ton more bandwith than these cards are using. It will be around for quite a while.
 
Oompa said:
The only change up I can see is PCI-e 32x replacing PCI-e 16x.
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I doubt there will be any x32 slots. :p The spacing of the extra transmitter and receiver pairs would make a slot almost twice as long as a PCI-E x16 slot (pair alternating with 2 grounds)... adding more than 120 pins. To picture how long that would be, look at a PCI-E video card and add 66 pins off the end since it likely would require another spacing key.

The biggest change coming is PCI-E v1.1. The spec change from v1.0a is mostly to help devices pass validation and there are no physical interface changes or speed differences. That's nothing to worry about. Newer chipsets using PCI-E v1.1 slots will run v1.0a cards and there are no v1.1 only devices yet.
 
and by the way PCIe works a 16x card would work in a 32x slot any way the xNumber is just the number of lanes its not like it was with AGP

with PCIe you can always use a smaller card in a faster slot
 
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