PCI Express graphics cards group test review
PCI Express graphics card
Review date: 23 March, 2005. Review by: IT Reviews Staff
Although AGP isn't yet a dead technology for graphics cards, it's rapidly moving on to the endangered list as PCI Express grows in popularity. Motherboards that support PCI Express have a large chunk of data bandwidth assigned to this new bus which is usually divided up into 20 lanes.
Of these 20 lanes, 16 are dedicated to a slot for a PCI Express 16x graphics card, or PCI-E 16x for short, and there will also be one or two short PCI-E 1x slots. Although we have yet to see expansion cards that use PCI-E, other than graphics cards, you can be sure that they will start to make an appearance during this year.
Athlon 64 and Pentium 4 motherboards that support PCI Express also have conventional PCI slots but you will usually have to choose between AGP or PCI Express graphics as very few motherboards support both types of graphics.
The real strength of PCI Express is that it has a huge capacity for future expansion in data bandwidth whereas AGP has almost reached the limits of the technology. PCI Express has two particularly neat tricks, one for the high end of the market and the other for the low end.
Budget PCI Express graphics cards can be supplied with very little onboard memory, say 32MB, to save on the cost of components and the graphics card can then use system memory for 3D work. Although this is slower than using onboard memory it is perfectly satisfactory for slower graphics chips such as the GeForce 6200.
At the high end we have dual graphics card technologies such as Nvidia's SLI (Scalable Link Interface) where the motherboard has two PCI Express graphics card slots. The graphics cards work in tandem to either power up to four monitors on the desktop, or they can work in a piggy-backed fashion to double the power of the graphics chip, which will be of interest to gamers.
So let's have a look at six PCI Express graphics cards to see what's on offer. Click the 'NEXT' link below to find out more.
Company: Aopen
Contact: +31 73 6459516
Company: Asus
Contact: 01908 217135
Company: XFX
Company: Sapphire
Contact: 01793 423830
Company: Leadtek
Contact: +31 36 5365578
Company: Sapphire
Contact: 01793 423830
