What is the diffrence between a PCI & PCI Express Slots ?

Question

What are the diffrences between PCI & PCI Express Slots for a graphics card, other than the size/ pins

is one cheaper than the other ? one faster ? one more modern ? or basicly the same thing just diffrent =P

Answer 1

Peripheral Component Interface (PCI) and PCI Express are both types of PC expansion slots. PCI was created by Intel in 1993, and became very popular on the PC platform. Many different types of cards were created in the PCI format including network, sound and video cards. PCI cards have a peak transfer rate of 133MB/s (on a 32MB bus).

As the data throughput rates of computer components continued to increase, the slower data transfer rates of PCI cards started to hinder the performance of newer computer systems. PCI Express was created in 2004 to replace PCI. There are different PCI Express specifications and the data transfer rates have been increased to 16GB/s with the newest specification released early this year.

PCI slots and PCI Express slots are not compatible; therefore you should not try to interchange cards between these two slot types. Since there are several different PCI Express card speeds, you should make sure that your motherboard can take advantage of the data transfer speed your card is capable of.

PCI-Express is the new standard for faster video cards. Most new video cards coming out today are designed for PCI-Express as most new motherboards and computers being made today are supporting this new connection.

A PCI-Express video card is NOT backwards compatible with PCI. So what you need to determine is if your computer is PCI-Express. A Sony Vaio from 2 years ago will most likely have either PCI or AGP connection. The order of video card types (listed slowest to fastest) is:

PCI

AGP

PCI-Express

Answer 2

PCI is much older than PCIe slots (started from 1990 and released in 1992) and has poor performance as compared to PCIe slots. PCI is smaller in length while PCIe slots are longer in length.

Amazing thing is PCI cards are nowadays costly than PCIe cards however PCIe cards/Slot is much faster (Power House, even faster than AGP) than PCI. It uses the latest technologies for transferring data upto 8GT/sec (gigatransfers/second) and many other advantages like low height cards, improved bandwidth (very important in graphics processing) etc..

There are PCIe 1.1 which have transfer rate of 2GT/sec with 250 MB/s,

PCIe 2.0 have transfer rate of 5GT.sec with 8-10Gb/sec, now the latest and improved with equalisation of tramitter and reciever, clock data recovery, PCIe 3.0 offers 8GT.sec with 20Gb/sec!!

If you want to buy the best then buy a motherboard having PCIe slots (atleast 2, having version 2.0 atleast) with CrossfireX or SLI technology (for very high quality of graphics) and they are inexpensive. You can compare the prices at http://www.ebay.com.

Answer 3

Yes, PCI-E is the modern and updated version of the old PCI interface. Most modern computers use PCI-E (E stands for Express) nowadays, so PCI is now obsolete. (You'd be hard pressed to find new motherboards that has PCI). You would only find PC slotsI in motherboards made before 2005.