your PC probably has a slot that looks like this it's a PCI Express x16 slot
and it's commonly used for graphics cards as it's one of the fastest
connections on your motherboard even the chunkiest most powerful gpus can be
handled by a single one of these slots no problem but there is another did you
know that PCI Express X32 is a real
thing that actually exists what the heck would you do with a slot that's twice as
long well to be clear it's very difficult to find slots physically
bigger than that standard x16 size remember that those numbers when we're
talking about PCI Express refer to the number of lanes not necessarily the
physical size of the slot a tiny m.2 SSD
often uses four PCI Express Lanes even though the connector is quite a bit
smaller than a regular PCIe X4 sized slot how exactly does PCI Express X32
work then it turns out that the PCI Express standard doesn't support a
single link greater than x16 the reason
for this is because it's very difficult to actually Implement links this wide in
Hardware you see when you send data down a PCI Express link say to a graphics
card that data is striped across multiple lanes and doing this is not
trivial when the data arrives wherever it's going it has to be Des skewed
meaning synchronized although PCI Express is a Serial interface that
doesn't require the data on each lane to to arrive at exactly the same time
synchronizing the data still involves Hardware overhead and once you start
getting past 16 Lanes it's just too much to keep up with so instead of having one
big slot these higher PCI Express connections use a trick called driver
binding essentially this allows multiple PCIe devices to talk to each other and
coordinate their traffic so they can act as one big device so a PCIe X32 link is
actually two x16 links mashed together
in software with the devices installed in two normal x16 slots the performance
overhead involved with driver binding for X32 isn't too bad but if you were to
theoretically go up to say x64 you'd
likely need more Hardware as at that point you just have too many
transactions for your poor system to handle but wait a sec why the heck would
you need that much bandwidth to begin with we'll tell you right after we thank
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below now the appeal of having this many PCI Express Lanes isn't so you can do
something like squeeze more performance out of your graphics card even an RTX
490 barely improves going from eight Lanes to 16 Lanes on a PCIe 4.0 slot
instead driver binding is used in applications where all the bandwidth you
can get is appealing you often see X32
links in certain kinds of networking cards mostly for server and data center
use although NVIDIA is obviously known more for gpus and AI they make a line of
network adapters that supports both Ethernet and another high-speed
networking protocol called infiniband this product for example goes into a
standard PCI Express x16 slot but it
comes with a second auxiliary card with the same connector they work in tandem
to provide an X32 connection for extra bandwidth in case you're using a
previous revision of PCI Express that doesn't provide enough bandwidth to take
full advantage of the network adapter speed there's also a special cable
connecting them to allow them to share data while taking some of the pressure
off of the PCI Express Bus itself and
connecting multiple machines with crazy amounts of bandwidth isn't even a rare
use case with how much growth we've seen with data hungry cloud services for
applications like AI gaming and Ultra highdef video data centers are already
moving towards 400 gabit connections or
even Beyond that's 400 times faster than
what you'll find in most Garden variety desktop PCS which is also part of why
you simply don't need PCI Express X32 in
your personal rig although I'm sure some of you are already thinking of ways
you're going to justify your purchase hey thanks for watching this video like
it if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it check out our other video on
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