PCI-e and SLI other uses

[Marshmallowman]

Will the second high speed PCI-e slot be usable for other more practical purposes like adding high performance RAID controllers or maybe even real time editng/capture cards?

[DGhost]

I believe it could. there was a picture floating around on the internet a few days ago of someone using two ATI X600 (?) cards on an SLI test rig. They were not running in any sort of SLI mode but they did both work.

[rylan]

I don't think you can use it for something else. I'll take a look at PCIe tech specs when I get back to work on Monday, but I think I remember the 16x slot is for graphics only, and with sli you get 2 "16x" slots even though only 8 lanes go to each one.

[Wombat]

Yes, you can use it for anything. PCI-e doesn't dedicate ports as "graphics ports" or anything.

[High_Jumbllama]

@Rylan. I believe with the early Intel boards that you get 24 lanes for one 16X and 1 8X slot. Both use the 16X slot size/shape. This will change though to what you said once better chipsets come out from various manufactureers.

With 1X, 2X, and 4X I believe they all plug into the 4X sized/shaped slots. Having five different sized slots would make finding a card that works in a particular one irritating. The cards and motherboards auto-negotiate this on boot up to figure out what the most is that they can use.

[Mehen]

I think gigabit LAN takes up about 4x

[Mcollector]

PCI Express (PCI-e) is supposed to replace PCI and AGP (and PCI-X, which never seems to have gotten very far off the ground in PCs). In several years you won't see either AGP or parallel PCI on mobos. So I say yes.

[rylan]

PCI-X is heavily used in server applications. Systems will need multiple PCIe 4x and 8x slots to replace the PCI-X 133/266 slots that are available now.

[High_Jumbllama]

Link
According to above link.

2.5 giga bits per second bidirectional per lane with sustained transfers of 200MB/s.

Therefore:
1 lane could easilly handle gigabit ethernet. 4 lanes could easilly handle a 4 port serial ATA or serial attached SCSI card. :drools: Imagine a motherboard with two 16X slots and five 4X slots. :drools again"

[Mcollector]

Originally posted by rylan
PCI-X is heavily used in server applications. Systems will need multiple PCIe 4x and 8x slots to replace the PCI-X 133/266 slots that are available now.

Interesting. Didn't know that.
I'd read about PCI-X and PCI-E a while back. I expected to see PCI-X show up on PC desktop/workstations before PCI-E, due to backward compatibility with PCI v. 2.3 cards in PCI-X slots, but it seemed that things were jumping from PCI to PCI-E and bypassing PCI-X altogether. I only recently noticed that Matrox' Imaging products are available as PCI-X, the first (and so far only) PCI-X products I've seen. Then again, I don't play with the latest and greatest...

[Wombat]

I see tons of PCI-X. All the fibre channel, SCSI, and ethernet stuff I play with is PCI-X.

[Duty]

Originally posted by DGhost
I believe it could. there was a picture floating around on the internet a few days ago of someone using two ATI X600 (?) cards on an SLI test rig. They were not running in any sort of SLI mode but they did both work.

Like this? http://graphics.tomshardware.com/gra...123/index.html

[rylan]

I heard that with SLI mode only the first head of the display is actually accelerated across cards. Anyone know if thats true? Would be kinda sucky for dual head uses.

[DGhost]

more like this...

A couple of days ago I mentioned getting hold of a K8T890Pro reference board and I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to set up four monitors across 2 X600XT graphic cards. To test out stretchy desktops, I discovered that HardOCP stretches nicely (above). More later…

[Kurt]

Originally posted by Wombat
I see tons of PCI-X. All the fibre channel, SCSI, and ethernet stuff I play with is PCI-X.

I wonder if/how long it will continue as the main tech for servers. It's faster than PCI-E in some of its iterations...2 years? 3 years?