On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 12:30 PM, Volker Armin Hemmann <volkerar...@googlemail.com> wrote: > Am Mittwoch, 11. April 2012, 02:11:35 schrieb Walter Dnes: >> On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 06:45:55PM +0100, Stroller wrote >> >> > I'm sceptical over the benefits of upgrading a 4 year old PC (short >> > of ripping most all the guts out and starting again). I know the >> > industry has currently settled on PCIe, but haven't bus speeds >> > increased in the last 4 years? Are all the latest cards compatible >> > with your Dell? If not, then you'll probably end up buying an older >> > model, and then that will be sub-optimal when you want to upgrade >> > your motherboard in a year's time. >> >> I've posted a snapshot of the Dell's internals on my ISP's personal >> webspace at http://clients.teksavvy.com/~walterdnes/misc/dell2.jpg Is >> the long black slot PCIe? What's the short black slot? >> >> > I'm sorry if this reply is unhelpful, but you give a lot of information, >> > and perhaps that means you might be open to considering alternative >> > solutions to the core problem. >> >> If it's PCIe, so be it. Actually, a post that prevents me wasting >> money is helpful <G>. Would PCIe be significantly better on the same >> CPU+GPU, or is it hype? > > a lot, lot lot lot better. No hype.
One thing worth noting about the difference between PCI and PCIe: PCI typically has all devices on the same bus, or on bridged buses. Traffic from one device at a particular instant means another device can't communicate until that first device is done. That means your PCI video card competes with your PCI hard disk controller and your PCI USB card for bandwidth. Two high-throughput devices like DMA-enabled video cards and disk controllers will get in each others' way. With PCIe, the data channels (called lanes) are electrically distinct; your video card and RAID card both communicate directly with the PCIe controller, and don't have to wait for a clear channel from each other before they can talk. *Logically*, PCIe looks like PCI when you run lspci or similar. At the hardware and electrical levels, though, they're quite different. -- :wq
