PCI-E (PCI Express) Video Cards

PCI-E is the new I/O bus technology that is well on its way to replacing AGP. PCI-E offers many advantages over AGP including increased bandwidth. Each PCI Express lane is capable of speeds up to 250 MB per second in each direction and increasing. PCI-E cards use a 1, 4, 8 or 16 lane slot (x1, x4, x8 and x16). A 164-pin x16 slot can provide around 4 GB per second, nearly twice the speed of AGP. All new video cards from NVIDIA and ATI will have a PCI Express version.

SLI

A major advantage of PCI Express is SLI. With SLI, two high-end PCI Express video cards can be installed in a PC and work together as one for much greater processing power. SLI requires a special motherboard with two PCI Express slots that support SLI and two PCI Express video cards with the same GPU.

Quad SLI

SLI supports dual video card setups. Quad SLI takes it a step further with support for 4 GPUs. The first Quad SLI PC was unveiled at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show by Dell and NVIDIA.

PCI-E Video Card Resources

• ATI announces HyperMemory for PCI Express video cards
• Tom's Hardware - PCI Express
• PCI Special Interest Group