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[Vieo]

1. Will agp video cards be compatible with PCI Express slots? (For example, you wanted to get a new motherboard, but you wanted to use your old agp card with it. Can you use it or do you need an agp slot? Are there motherboard with both PCI Express and AGP slots?)

2. Can you plug your old PCI devices(video, sound, modems, etc) in PCI Express slots and have them work?

3. Can someone give me a FAQ on PCI Express? I've noticed that not all PCI Express slots look the same. Some are really tiny and some are really long. What's the deal on that?

 

[maharg]

The thing is, PCI Express is a completely different system from either PCI or AGP. It's a serial architecture instead of a parallel one (which makes it much much much faster), and so it would not make sense to have the port be backward compatible. However, a system should be able to have both types of ports and AGP as well, and to the software the PCI Express bus just looks like another PCI bus.

 

[teiresias]

There will probably be at least a few PCI Express boards that have some legacy slots on them, an AGP slot and maybe some PCI slots. After that everything will probably have to be PCI Express in your system.

Current PCI devices will not work in PCI Express slots unless some company decides to make some bridge card or something (kind of like the old "slotket" things to fit slot-CPU's in sockets when they changed back to sockets from slots).

There are different widths of PCI Express slots, I know there's at least 4x and 16x, I'm not sure what all the variations are, and I don't have a link handy. I'd imagine the amount of throughput a device needs will dictate which width slot it will require, and since it's serial I'm guessing the bigger width slots just allow more channels of data to be used (with each channel being a single serial bus using a protocol for whatever width data it is specified for, I'm not on the up-and-up on the spec myself).

All I know if my current PC isn't getting an upgrade until PCI Express stuff settles and the prices come down a bit - well, maybe I'll add some RAM, but aren't there some funky changes to system RAM coming down the pike as well?

 

[maharg]

Here's a pretty good overview of a lot of it.

I don't know of any big changes to the way RAM upgrades happen coming soon. Mostly it's just PCI-Express and Serial ATA as major shifts in component architectures. I too am waiting for these to settle down before I do any major upgrading.

 

[Vieo]

Bah! Curses! I was planning on buying a GeForce6800GT or Ultra in december or a bit earlier. Now I don't know wether I should hold out and wait, or just go ahead. One things for sure, this GeForceFX 5200 I'm using now sucks and won't cut it much longer. I want to play DOOM3, The Sims 2, Half-Life 2, and NWN2, damn it! >=T

 

[teiresias]

Well, at least for NWN2, you won't be seeing that until 2006 anyway.

 

[Vieo]

Here's a pretty good overview of a lot of it.

Why does that chart have "optical buses" listed after PCI Express? In the future lasers will be used instead of electric currents? =)

 

[maharg]

Why does that chart have "optical buses" listed after PCI Express? In the future lasers will be used instead of electric currents? =)

Most likely, yes.