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Remember: PCI-E Port Size and Lanes May Not Be the Same Thing
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There are a small amount of PCI-E mounted solid state drives that prefer an x4 port, but those seem to have been swiftly overtaken by the new M.2 standard, which can also use the PCI-E bus. High-end network cards and enthusiast equipment like adapters and RAID controllers use a mix of x4 and x8 formats.
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Graphics cards tend to use x16 just for the sake of maximum data transfer, but obviously you don’t need a network card to use an x16 port and sixteen full lanes when its Ethernet port is only capable of transferring data at one gigabit per second (about an eighth of the throughput of one PCI-E lane-remember, eight bits to a byte). There aren’t any set guidelines for which expansion cards will use which number of lanes. RELATED: What Is the M.2 Expansion Slot, and How Can I Use It? Most discrete graphics cards use a full PCI-E x16 slot. The PCI-E x16 ports, with a theoretical maximum of around 15GBps on the 3.0 revision, are used for almost all modern graphics cards designed by NVIDIA and AMD. A card that bumps up to the physically larger x4 or x8 slot, like a USB 3.0 expansion card, can transfer data four or eight times faster-and it would need to, if more than two of those USB ports were being used at their maximum transfer rate. So a device that uses a PCI-E x1 port, like a low-power sound card or a Wi-Fi antenna, can transfer data to the rest of the computer at approximately 1GBps. RELATED: Is Now a Good Time to Buy a New NVIDIA or AMD Graphics Card? What Peripherals Use Which Ports?įor the common revision 3.0 version of PCI Express, the maximum per-lane data rate is eight gigatransfers, a term that means “all the data and electronic overhead at once.” In the real world, the speed for PCI-E revision 3 is a little less than one gigabyte per second, per lane. And now we’re going to stop talking about bars and bartenders, because our poor metaphorical drinkers are in danger of alcohol poisoning. But a patron sitting in the assigned “x4” seat would have four bartenders fetching him drinks and food, and the “x8” seat would have eight bartenders just for her drinks, and the one in the “x16” seat would have a whopping sixteen bartenders just for him. Going back to our bar metaphor: if you imagine each patron sitting at the bar as a PCI-E device, then an x1 lane would be a single bartender serving a single customer. But generally speaking, the more lanes there are on a single PCI-E port and its connected card, the faster data can flow between the peripheral and the rest of the computer system. Different revisions of the PCI-E standard allow for different speeds on each lane. These connections are colloquially known as “lanes,” with each PCI-E lane comprised of two signaling pairs, one for sending data and the other for receiving data. The different physical sizes allow for different numbers of simultaneous data pin connections to the motherboard: the larger the port, the more maximum connections on the card and the port. (x32 ports exist, but are extremely rare and generally not seen on consumer hardware.) Different sized cards support different maximum PCI-Express lanes. But the different revisions all use the same physical connections, and those connections can come in four primary sizes: x1, x4, x8, and x16. PCI-E has gone through multiple revisions since its inception currently new motherboards generally use version 3 of the standard, with the faster version 4 becoming more and more common and version 5 expected to hit in 2019. That’s where the idea of multiple lanes comes in.
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Now to extend our deli/bar metaphor, imagine that some of those seats have multiple bartenders reserved just for them. (Okay, so it’s never possible to get a bartender to every patron right away, but let’s pretend this is a really great bar.) With dedicated data lanes for each expansion card or peripheral, the entire computer can access components and accessories faster. PCI-E is more like a bar, every patron sitting down in an assigned seat, with multiple bartenders taking everyone’s order at once. The old PCI standard was like a deli, everyone waiting in a single line to get served, with the speed of service limited by a single person at the counter.
COM PORT ON COMPUTER PC
In layman’s terms, imagine your desktop PC as a restaurant. This motherboard supports both: PCIE x16 in blue, PCIE x1 in black, and PCI in beige. PCI Express replaced the older PCI slot standard. That meant that each individual PCI port and its installed cards could take full advantage of their maximum speed, without multiple cards or expansions being clogged up in a single bus.
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As an upgrade to the original PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) system, PCI Express had one huge advantage when it was initially developed in the early 2000s: it used a point-to-point access bus instead of a serial bus.