PCI Express

[Jammydodger]

Just incase ur thinking of upgrading ur comp have a look at this article first.

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1087

 

[Murray_H]

Well my b-day is on the 21st of April, thats when i'll be getting a p00ter. Hopefully all this PCI-Express stuff and the new form factor will be in PCs so that the price of the old stuff will go down

 

[RandomPING]

I'm wondering when a graphics card will come out that will support PCI-Express. For a while i bet we're going to have PCI Express and AGP 8X cards comming out at the same time.

 

[Top Secret]

You know, I'm just wondering what everyone finds so special about PCI Express. I mean, you people realize that a Radeon 9800XT or FX5950 barely fills a 4x AGP line anyways don't you?

 

[Asus]

Yes, most of the proccessing is on the graphics card now and it only once in a while goes off to the CPU/System Memory.
BUT, PCI Express is serial (Rather than Parrallel). Much faster and lower latencies which will improve any data going outside the GFX card so it can get back to its onboard proccessing quicker.

It will help a lot more than GFX cards. RAID cards on PCI Express? Capture cards?

 

[RoyalEF]

PCI-Express can be exteneded 5 meters via cables, so PCI-Express could be used to replace USB/Firewire with a uniform connection platform. Of course PCI-express 16 is slower than USB & Firewire currently. However it is dedicated where others are shared bandwidth across a controller.

 

[ComradeBadger]

Very interesting

I've been following BTX for a while

 

[TheOtherDude]

Of course PCI-express 16 is slower than USB & Firewire currently. However it is dedicated where others are shared bandwidth across a controller.

USB 2.0 Transfer Rate = 480 Mbps or 60 MB/s

PCI-E x16 Transfer Rate = ~4000 MB/s

And are you sure PCI-E is dedicated? Do you have a link? It wasn't clear to me after reading the PCStats article.

 

[RandomPING]

So is PCI-Express going to be only on BTX boards?

 

[ComradeBadger]

So is PCI-Express going to be only on BTX boards?

Pretty much I think

 

[Jammydodger]

Another good article about BTX - http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1876&p=2

 

[RABIES]

Two comments for this post:
1. Wow, a standard that will actually support 2 high end video cards at once. Nice...
2. What? They stopped at X16, were they afraid that the case screws would come undone at X32? :E

 

[OCybrManO]

No, X32 just sounds too close to the failed Sega "32X" and they thought people would confuse the two.

 

[RoyalEF]

USB 2.0 Transfer Rate = 480 Mbps or 60 MB/s

PCI-E x16 Transfer Rate = ~4000 MB/s

And are you sure PCI-E is dedicated? Do you have a link? It wasn't clear to me after reading the PCStats article.

Actually the linked article confused me with the 200 MB/s (which is so loosely used that it means megabits or megabytes, with the author often not knowing the difference).

I went back to Intel's specs and I don't know where the 200 MB number comes from. PCI-Express supports up to 32 dual simplex data lanes, each lane support a 2.0Gbit/s (effective, actually runs at 2.5gbps) pathway. At a 32 pair config you get a max of 128 Gbits/second. Dual simplex sounds like the transmission is full duplex, so it is 128 gb in each direction, simultaneously.

Anyway they are point to point connections which means they have full bandwdith to the switch that all connect to. The switch (note not hub) can switch between devices without involving other devices, providng full trasnfer rate between two PCI-express devices. Now, as with any switching device on a network (PCI-Express is modelled after packet-based networking) there is a question of the backplane's capacity. Basically how many 128gbps transfers can be active at the same time before the switch can't route the transfer.

 

[Vigilante]

and then agp 16x comes out