Questions about PCI Express & AGP

mldeveloper

Member
May 12, 2004
38
0
0
1. Is PCI-E going to replace all PCI slots and AGP or just AGP?

2. Will motherboards be offering both PCI-E and AGP slots for the first year or so?
 

Stunt

Diamond Member
Jul 17, 2002
9,717
2
0
16x PCI-E for gfx cards, 1x PCI-E for pci bus cards.

use an agp to 16x PCI-E adapter im guessing...they already have a PCI-E to AGP adapter

PCI-E replaces all agp and pci
 

Matthias99

Diamond Member
Oct 7, 2003
8,808
0
0
Originally posted by: Stunt
16x PCI-E for gfx cards, 1x PCI-E for pci bus cards.

There's also 4x and 8x speeds, although they'll probably start with just 1x and 16x. 1x PCI-E is faster than 1xAGP, so it offers a lot more bandwidth already (plenty for, say, a Gigabit Ethernet controller, or a RAID controller).

use an agp to 16x PCI-E adapter im guessing...they already have a PCI-E to AGP adapter

Uh, no. You can't put AGP cards in a PCI-E slot with an adaptor (see existing posts on this topic). You'll have to buy a new videocard.

PCI-E replaces all agp and pci

Yes, although most motherboards will probably include legacy PCI slots for a while (I mean, it took *years* to get rid of ISA completely when PCI came out). You cannot put regular PCI cards in a PCI-E slot, although it is possible to put a PCI slot *behind* a PCI-E x1 slot (the PCI-E slots are relatively small, since it's a serial interface), like so:

..PCI-E x1 slot........PCI slot...............
|| [===] [=================]
Edge of MB

which would allow you to have both PCI and PCI-E x1 slots without taking up any "extra" space on the MB.