PCI Express

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ForTheWorld

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I have been out of the technology loop for a while and haven't followed many(any) advancements lately. I finally decided I was going to build a new pc and I am only now hearing about PCI Express. How long ago did this come out? What are the differences with PCIE and PCI? I'm just looking for some general info and some reccomendations about pcie video cards. I mainly watch a lot of movies, do some photo editing and gaming, so I am looking for a card that will work well in these categories. Any help is appreciated.

Thanks
 
How long ago did this come out?

I think it came out summer-ish 2004.

What are the differences with PCIE and PCI

PCIE is a whole lot faster. Have a look at this.

I'm just looking for some general info and some reccomendations about pcie video cards. I mainly watch a lot of movies, do some photo editing and gaming

It doesn't sound like you're too heavy into gaming. So maybe look at getting an ATi Radeon X600 Pro, they sell for about $140 CAD. If you are a moderate gamer, I would say go for a Nvidia 6600GT, which go for about $250 CAD. If you are a little heaver into gaming, then go with two 6600GTs in SLI (running two vid cards bridged together).

Here's some benchmarks on how well the PCIE cards perform:
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20041222/index.html
 
1: PCI-E's are New
2: obvioulsy newer is better, as in case you buy a PCI-E card, it will be used in upcoming boards as well, whilst AGP will have limitations. as if you see market trend, every new motherboard chiupset is coming out with PCI-E slots.

3: theorotically, PCI-E is twice as fast as AGP (previous tech for Graphic cards), but in actual it isnt. same goes to when AHP 8X came out, it was marginally faster than AGP4X, so is the case with PCI-E. i'll recommend this as the cards bought on PCI-E can be used in future as well.
 
well for some more technical info. PCI stands for peripheral componet interconnect. Old pci is found those old motherboards that still have ISA on them and the PCI then ran at 33Mhz. the new PCI in todays new computers runs at 66Mhz. Now back to PCIE. PCIE has a larger width and runs at 133Mhz, so there for the PCIE runs at 2 the speed of ordinary PCI. Like elbatrop1 said you can bridge to PCIE cards together and you can get some major power out of you graphics cards. PCIE is still pretty and the price of motherboards with PCIE reflects that.

EXTRA INFO: you can overclock the PCIE and PCI bus and get even more MHZ out of the bus. but i am sure all of us know that overclocking should be avoided unless you are preparied to take the risk.

hope this gives you a better understanding of PCI and PCIE
 
The pcie is good for gaming, but thats about it.. There is/has to be a major flaw in the design specification for the nforce 4 chipset (they're already coming out with 5, less than a year after 4). I remember similiar things happening when agp was becoming the video card standard.
 
I woud recomend the NVIDIA 6600GT best bang for buck card. IT goes for around 200$ USD
 
currently PCI-E offers no real advantage over AGP in terms of speed besides the fact that 'Its futureproof'

The cards can't even fully utilize the PCI-E bandwidth yet
 
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