Questions About PCI Express

[HighCalibreHooch]

I'm building a new gaming system in the fall, and I'm puzzled by the incoming PCI Express.

Since PCI-E slots are backward compatible with PCI slots, and the PCI-E x16 slot is not backward compatible with the AGP slot .....

.... are these new motherboards going to have an PCI-E x16 slot, an AGP slot, PCI-E slots *and* standard PCI slots?

If so, that's a lot of slots. My atx case has only seven holes built in, like most do, for expansion cards. Are motherboard makers going to divide up only 7 slots between these four standards?

Regards,

HCH

 

[Peter]

Except for VIA's chipsets, north bridges will offer either AGP or PCI-E-16x for the graphics card. Some also have an extra 4x link for something other that wants a really fast connection, like a proper RAID controller or something.

The coming breed of south bridges do have a legacy PCI bus alongside a couple of PCI-E-1x links. Possibly the latter will be consumed by onboard high bandwidth additions like Gbit Ethernet, SATA controllers and whatnot, long before we'll get to see PCI-E slots replacing legacy PCI.