I have a PCI Express question regarding the 1X, 8X and 16X types???

Question

I was getting a new motherboard and noticed there are different types of PCI-X slots on the board. I had a couple of questions.

1. Video cards are the only cards that will need the 16X due to the bandwidth and resources required for this. Are there any other cards that may need 16X.

2. I notice some companies sell boards with 4X as well as 8X. What type of cards need 4X vs 8X. It seems that everything else would just require 1X.

3. I heard 32X will be comming out. Is it worth it to wait.....

Answer 1

No other cards will require the x16 slot, that is reserved for graphics (as far as I know) and that may change in the future but for now, it is graphics only. There are only x4 and x1 slots (more on x8 in a minute). The x4 and x1 slots are (again, as far as I know) backwards compatible and right now you can put networking cards in them (there is no advantage over PCI currently). Now the x8 slots really don't exist. The only reason you will see x8 is because some dual slotted PCIe x16 motherboards reduce the speed to x8 when running dual GPUs (it's a shared bus so the speed is reduced). You should look for a motherboard that explicitly states dual x16 slots. The Asus A8N32-SLI motherboard supports full PCIe x16 in dual GPU mode and it costs about $200.