PCI-Express..what do you think?

[HAND]

The birth of PCI-Express is close at hand...and PCI is heading for retirement after many years of loyal service.



Is PCI-Express worth a prompt upgrade or is there little point until next year? The new video cards will use the new interface.
For reference here is a link to Tom's Hardware..

The future beckons.. I'm interested in your thoughts!

 

[Comraddict]

PCI Express- offers no speed increase, just takes money out of your pocket.

They should work on making existing solutions more efficient, both on hardware and software level.

 

[FireBall]

Gah.. really, I like the idea... but it means I'm gonna need a new MotherBoard for upgrading this PC, and others aI have..

 

[Speedo]

There's no point in upgrading now. I'd at least wait until until there are native PCI-express cards on the market. All the ones now use something (forget what, don't feel like looking) to convert from AGP to PCI-E. AFAIK the later cards in nVIDIA's newest line will be the first that are native PCI-E.

 

[LordKestrel]

PCI Express has potential to be great, but as always, it all depends on how it's implemented. If the motherboard vendors create motherboards with only 1 or 2 low speed PCI-E slots, it won't go anywhere. If however, they actually put in 4 or 5 full speed slots, it'll be adopted quicker, and more products will be released for it.

 

[DreadCthulhu]

Even the low speed slots will be a huge improvement over PCI. PCI only gives you 133 Megabytes/second, shared with all of your PCI devices. This simply isn't enough for running gigabit ethernet & other devices. But even the lowest speed PCI-E, 1lane, gives each device a 250MB/sec bandwidth. More lanes can be added to a slot, for devices that need more speed - video cards will be using a 16lane solution, giving them 4GB/sec bandwidth.

But I doubt PCI-E will cause a jump in graphics card performance. 8xAGP cards(2.1GB/sec) were barely(less than 1%) faster than the same card running in 4xAGP mode. Game-programers try to make sure the game fits with the video card memory; having to hit the system memory, even with PCI-E bandwidth, will still cause slowdown.