I get a lot of questions about PCI Express what works with what what
doesn't work with what what are the different Generations what does it all
mean so today we're going to tell you everything you need to know about PCI
Express 3.0 as fast as possible so let's start with the very Basics PCI Express
is the interface that is used to plug modern expansion Cards into modern
computers or motherboards it completely replaced PCI and AGP which is great
because AGP was only for graphics cards and PCI had to be used for pretty much
everything else PC Express works with pretty much anything sound cards network
cards raid cards video cards they'll all pretty much fit as long as you're aware
of a few simple guidelines now I said they're Universal but PCI Express slots
are available in a variety of different physical configurations the most common
ones are 1X 4X 8X and 16x all of these
types have different slots on the cards themselves and different slots on the
motherboard the cool part about that is that they're uper and downwards
compatible though here I am plugging a PCI Express 1X card into a 16x slot it
gets the same power delivery it just gets less bandwidth delivered to it
because that's all a sound card actually needs and not only that but I can take
this PCIe 8X raid card and plug it into a PCIe 4X slot it'll still work but it
will only have half of the bandwidth available to it that it would have
otherwise had if you plugged it into an 8X slot the other thing that affects the
performance of PCI Express is the generation here I'm holding a PCI Express
generation 2 16x card and here I'm holding a PCI Express Generation 3 16x
card they look physically the same on the connectors but the actual available
bandwidth has doubled in fact the available bandwidth of PCI Express cards
has doubled with each generation so a PCI Express Generation 1 16x slot is
only equivalent in performance to a PCI Express Generation 3 4X slot so the
takeaways from this are pretty straightforward PCI Express cards work
in PCI Express slots as long as there's nothing physically in the way
performance on the other hand is going to be dictated by what generation of PCI
Express the card and the slaughter running at so it'll run at whatever is
the lowest generation of either the two components so Gen 2 card gen 3 slot plug
them together they run at gen two and then performance is also determined by
the length of the card and the length of the slot so for example this quad Port
gigabit Nick needs at least 500 megabytes per second of bandwidth in
order to operate at Peak efficiency that means if I have an older PCIe gen 1
motherboard I'll need at least a 4X slot or a hypothetical 2x slot to get the
bandwidth I need because it's only 250 megabytes per second in a 1x slot
however if I have a PCI Express Gen 2 motherboard I could even use a 1x slot
to get everything I need because that'll be about 500 megabytes per
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