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Is PCI-E x1 still to be avoided?

F

Flubb

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 11, 2009
Messages
181
When I bought my X-Fi, everyone was claiming PCIE x1 didn't have the bandwith to run a soundcard from properly.

Now it seems like 9 of 10 sound cards are PCI-E x1. Are manufacturers still making superior cards for inferior buses, or is there no problem with PCI-E x1?
 
A PCIe 2.0 x1 slot has more bandwidth than a PCI slot and should be more than enough for a soundcard.
 
Bandwidth was never the issue. Creative Labs whined and bitched that the timing on a PCIe card wouldn't work for audio because of interrupt latency and blah, blah, blah. It was just Creative being whiny because they didn't understand the new technology. They figured it out, and released a PCIe chip and now it seems to be what they push.

As an example of just how much you can do, Mark of The Unicorn, a professional soundcard maker, has a card called the PCIe-424. It is a PCIe 1x card that connects their outboard sound interfaces. To that you can connect 4 24I/O units, each which support 24 channels of 24-bit 96kHz input AND 24 channels of 24-bit, 96kHz output at the same time.

PCIe has bandwidth for days from a soundcard's perspective. 1x is plenty of bandwidth for pretty much any expansion except RAID, gig (or 10 gig) net, and video. Of those, 4x is generally plenty for net and RAID. Only video needs insane amounts of bandwidth.
 
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