Let’s talk about the PCI Express adapter.  Technology moves fast.  If you sit there long enough, it will pass you by.  It wasn’t that long ago that AGP was the newest kid on the block.  Now you are hearing about PCI express.  We’ll look at what it is and also address adapters for PCI Express (meaning ways we can hook legacy PCI up to PCI express) if you came here seeking it.

Basically PCI express or PCIe allows for much great speed.  Isn’t that always what drives improvements in the computer technology sphere?  Well, forget using your legacy PCI stuff in PCI express, unless you have a PCI express adapter.  We’ll talk about that in a minute.  There have been 3 versions of PCI express so far.  Each one has had a good improvement in speed.  Version 1 had a data rate of 250 MB/s, version 2 500 MB/s, and version 3 1 GB/s.  There are also PCI Express adapter mini cards for laptops.  That’s about all you need to know about that.  I will say that a smaller PCIe card (like x1) can fit into any larger one and work just fine.  Obviously, a larger one could not fit into a smaller one.  That’s the point.  Now, I will address exceptions below.

Now, if you are trying to get a PCI or AGP card into PCI Express, forget it unless you have a PCI express adapater.  Before I get to that, however, let me address the point I made above.  You can’t put an x16 card into a x8 slot, because it won’t fit.  That is, unless you buy a PCI Express adapter, like this one. See, that makes the x16 fit into the x8 slot via an adapter.

You can also do a pcie to pci adapter.  Took me awhile to find this one:

or you can do pci to pcie, again took me a while to find, but none of these are cheap:

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts