Uses for the PCIe x1 slot?

[The Land of Smeg]

Well I'm about to buy a new motherboard that has PCI Express. It has:

3x PCI Slots
2x PCIe x1 Slots
2x PCIe x8/x8 -or- x1/x16 slots (SLI )

Well anyway, with all these PCIe x1 slots, these seem kind of useless with out anything being compatable with them yet, I want to be sure PCIe x1 cards that I want will be available in the future.

My main concern is the amount of bandwith x1 slots offer in comparison to PCI slots.

Will the following likely to be available in the future (have enough bandwidth to support):
[*]Low-end Graphics Card... The equivelent of a PCI Radeon 9200SE. (Might want to go multi-monitor one day)
[*]Firewire Ports/USB2.0 Ports(Might not have enough)
[*]Wireless Networking Cards - 802.11g/802.11n (I current use a PCI Wireless-G card, and I intend to upgrade to N when it's out)
[*]TV Tuners (Definately want one of these in the future without doubt)
[*]Gigabit Ethernet Cards (Just Hypothetically, The Motherboard comes with one that's OnBoard)
[*]SATA2 Cards/SATA2 RAID Cards (Hypothetically)
[*]PATA Cards/PATA RAID Cards (Hypothetically)
[*]SCSI Cards/SCSI RAID Cards (Hypothetically)
[*]Anything else you can think of.
[*]etc. etc.

Thanks.

If I want to add any of these components in the future, I would prefer to stay away from PCI Cards because they would be obsolete sooner and I will only have 3 PCI slots available for use.

 

[drpootums]

I think the only real useful ones would be a Ethernet card, because the other ones (except USB and Firewire, but i dont know of any devices that can use the 400mb/s bandwidth). I also think that they will be very overpriced IMO.

I think it's ok to use PCI because if u only use 1 device at a time (or 2) to use the limited 133mb/s bandwidth. Also gunna be cheaper.

 

[SunSamurai]

"but i dont know of any devices that can use the 400mb/s bandwidth"

Can you say video capture and RAID?

 

[MDE]

Sound cards can use gobs of bandwidth. Think real time Dolby encoding\decoding... (don't take this as saying Creative or Nvidia may do this)

 

[SrGuapo]

Originally posted by: MDE
Sound cards can use gobs of bandwidth. Think real time Dolby encoding\decoding... (don't take this as saying Creative or Nvidia may do this)

I thought I heard some rumors that nvidia was going to make a soundstorm PCI-e x1 card... No sources, I've just seen that thrown around...

In the next couple of years, they will probably be a few devices that will need the bandwidth. Sound cards, ethernet cards (though that is built in the mobo), video capture, etc. would all benefit from some extra bandwidth...

 

[shinotenshi]

Creative is rumored to be building its next generation sound card on pci-e no word on dolby encoding however, so it might just be the same ole just on pci-e
Nvidia is though to be either designing its soundstorm 2 either on pci-e or as part of its next GPU. time and the release of the ps3 will tell.

 

[The Land of Smeg]

how much bandwidth is offered by x1?

and how much bandwidth is offered by PCI?

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: The Land of Smeg
how much bandwidth is offered by x1?

250 MB/Sec bidirectional per lane, so it's a good improvement over 33 MHz/32bit PCI.

 

[Tostada]

PCI
32-bit / 33 MHz
33,333,333 Hz * 4 byte/sec = 133,333,333 byte/sec = 127 MB/sec (shared)

PCI 66MHz
32-bit / 66 MHz
66,666,666 Hz * 4 byte/sec = 266,666,666 byte/sec = 254 MB/sec (shared)

64-bit PCI
64-bit / 33 or 66 MHz
66,666,666 Hz * 8 byte/sec = 533,333,333 byte/sec = 509 MB/sec (shared)

PCI-X
64-bit / 66 or 100 or 133 MHz
133,333,333 Hz * 8 byte/sec = 1,066,666,666 byte/sec = 0.993 GB/sec (shared)

PCI-X 266
64-bit / 266 MHz (133 MHz double-pumped)
266,666,666 Hz * 8 byte/sec = 2,133,333,333 byte/sec = 1.99 GB/sec (shared)

AGP 8X
32-bit / 533 MHz (66 MHz ... err ... octa-pumped?)
533,333,333 Hz * 4 byte/sec = 2,133,333,333 byte/sec = 1.99 GB/sec

PCI-Express x1
1-bit (each direction) / 2.5 GHz
2,500,000,000 Hz * 1 bit/sec = 312,500,000 byte/sec = 298 MB/sec

PCI-Express x16
16-bit (each direction) / 2.5 GHz
2,500,000,000 Hz * 16 bit/sec = 5,000,000,000 byte/sec = 4.66 GB/sec


That's raw throughput before considering overhead. For example, PCI-X 266 doesn't come anywhere close to 2GB/sec. PCIe is actually supposed to achieve 250 MB/sec per link, 4 GB/sec for x16. I guess that's pretty nice when a PCIe x1 slot has double the bandwidth of the entire PCI bus available in each direction.

Of course, I just pulled all this out of my ass from what I know. I've still never seen anything very specific about the actual PCIe signaling except that it's at 2.5 GHz.

 

[Mem]

Well anyway, with all these PCIe x1 slots, these seem kind of useless with out anything being compatable with them yet, I want to be sure PCIe x1 cards that I want will be available in the future.

Sound cards,modems,NICs, you name it,they`ll be available on PCIe sooner or later.