What does a PCI and AGP slot do?

[DummyTron]

Hey i was just wondering what you plug in to a PCI slot.
I know that an AGP slot takes care of your graphics...if anyone could me an example it owuld be nice, but what do you put into a PCI slot, furthermore PCI slots have 64 pinns or 32 pinns? and what was the old fashion style of PCI?

 

[Nubius]

PCI slots are for network cards, sound cards, they also have PCI based graphics cards but are slower than AGP.

PCI has been around for a while, don't think there was necessarily an 'old fashioned' style of them although there have been different slots in the past such as a 64bit PCI slot compared to todays 32bit.


PCI-Express is becoming a new standard replacing AGP. PCI-Express is NOT the same as PCI though as the PCI-Express is meant for the graphics card as of now.

 

[sweety]

PCI is the preffered bus architecture and is used to add devices such as SCSI host adapters, modems, network cards, video cards, sound cards etc. Exist 2 tipes of PCI 32 bit and 64 bit slots ...32 bit PCI can be used on 64 bit.

The AGP slot is intended for use with video cards because it provides a high speed path directly between the graphics card and system memory.

 

[CntdwnToExtn]

PCI has been around for a while, don't think there was necessarily an 'old fashioned' style of them although there have been different slots in the past such as a 64bit PCI slot compared to todays 32bit.

maybe he was thinkin' about ISA??..tha's what came to my head first about "old" pci slots...but i guess with the two you mentioned maybe that's what he ment.

 

[Pilotwings119]

yeah ISA is the old PCI slots- ISA is much longer and more pins, obviously slower, and older technology

 

[mlr]

pci devices communicate with the cpu via a dedicated channel,pci was designed to be a 64-bit architecture, although it is usually implemented as 32-bit,with a maxium data transfer rate of over 130bps,pci supports bus mastering.this allows separate pci expansion cards to communicate directly with the pci bus and each other,wiuthout any intervention from the cpu.they come in two versions,5 volts and 3.3 volts.the slots fr each are different so it is impossible to connect the wrong voltage card
the use of full 64-bit pci slots is largely restricted to high-end server systems.like their 32-bit equivalent,64-bit pci connectors support either 3.3 volt or 5 volt expansion cards,although some cards are designed to fit into either slot type.

 

[Nubius]

Yeah, jak recently sent me a dual CPU mobo, it's only top FSB of 266 though but it's got a couple 64bit PCI slots in it

 

[DummyTron]

yeah ISA ..there you go, i couldn't think of the name when i was creating the post... i gues those must be the ones on my Packard bell i bought in 1997..lol... 100 mghz and the slots are extremely long.