Why so few PCI Express x1 Components?

[g-paw]

Does anyone know why there are so few PCI Express x1, e.g., wireless cards and sound cards? It's been out long enough for mfg to develop stuff.

 

[BUFF]

there are already a couple of wireless cards e.g. abit's AirPace & a couple of soundcard mfrs incl. Creative have announced x1 PCI-E cards although I haven't seen any actually in retail.
It's a bit chicken & egg - the mfrs want the market to develop before they commit but the market can't develop until there are products ...

 

[g-paw]

Can understand the chicken and egg early on in development but PCIe has been around long enough you'd thinks mfg would have started development years ago. This has obviously not been the case with video cards. Think I'll post this on the Future Article section, I just really find it curious that given how quickly new technology is usually adopted, this has taken so long.

 

[g-paw]

Given I've never used a PCIe card not sure about the placement on the mobo but they seem to be the same place as the PCI slots. If you mean by "placement", the number of PCI cards in use, it would seem that video card mfg faced the same issues given that up until the advent of PCIe X16 all video cards were either AGP or PCI and would guess that more than half were AGP, which are pretty much extinct on new mobo with a few exceptions. Given the number of PCI cards out there I can understand why mobo mfg would have to include PCI slots for years to come. . I just have to believe there is a technological explanation for this, e.g., if Creative came out with a PCIe sound card, a lot of people would buy one whether they needed a new card or not because it's new plus people replacing sound cards would likely buy them if they weren't significantly more expensive. If I thought this was just a philosophical questions, I'd do what I usually do when addressing these, grab a beer, some exotic "tobacco", stare at my belly button and come up with an answer. Given I think it a tech question, I need help with the answer. Damn reality.

 

[Heyyou27]

I've got a Powercolor Theater Pro 550 PCIe 1x TV tuner card.

 

[g-paw]

what i mean is that on a few mobo's i have seen they are usually right next to the x16 pci-e slots. when you use a gfx card with a big cooler or a dual slot one, it renders the smaller pci-e 1x slots useless. therefore i myself and i assume a few others cannot use the pci-e 1x slot due to obstruction.

That makes sense, in fact I think they sometimes put them between the SLI slots

Heyyou27, of the 69 TV tuner cards on newegg, 4 are PCIe X1, guess you have a very rare breed

 

[f61]

A few boards put the pci-e 1x above the 16x slot, and remain accessible... smart board IMHO. The only worthwhile device I've seen for the PCI-e 1x slot is a LAN card for those people that have on-board PCI LAN or gigabit on said PCI. THere IS quite a noticable difference esp. on DSL. Chief Value has the Rosewill RM401 based on the LSI (Agere) 1310 series and only needs a driver for x64 or Vista, which is included... priced at $25.

Other than that I guess the TV cards are it.

f61

 

[aBg_rOnGak]

What Stranger said are true, plus in my opinion (rather limited, and not purely based on facts, just pure opinion, so take with tons of salt), not many things needed the speed and bandwidth of PCIe.

1.Most (if not all) boards (enthusiast-based especially) have integrated gigabit Ethernet controller on-board. Other than graphics cards, this is the only thing that I can think of that needed speed and bandwidth more than other things

2.Sound cards, even the most powerful ones, does not need the bandwidth as much as the graphics cards

3.Most Average Joe and Jane don't give much d@mn about the differences, plus most can't pronounce it right

4.There's still a lot, really lot of older boards with PCI slots and no PCIe slots

But still, I personally think the motherboards manufactures should have made better board layout/ design with more PCIe slots while add-ons manufactures produce more PCIe cards

Sorry for kinda bad english, and as I stated before, this is only personal opinion, not 100% facts

 

[g-paw]

A few boards put the pci-e 1x above the 16x slot, and remain accessible... smart board IMHO. The only worthwhile device I've seen for the PCI-e 1x slot is a LAN card for those people that have on-board PCI LAN or gigabit on said PCI. THere IS quite a noticable difference esp. on DSL. Chief Value has the Rosewill RM401 based on the LSI (Agere) 1310 series and only needs a driver for x64 or Vista, which is included... priced at $25.

Other than that I guess the TV cards are it.

f61

Does the PCIe LAN card make much difference if you're using a router and cable?

 

[f61]

Any time a Lan is routed PCI opposed to PCI-e there is a performance hit.

Cable has the ability to be over-subscribed, and this increases noise and latency on the connection during busy periods. Your transfer rates go into the porcelain funnel. That doesn't happen with DSL. (But your DISTANCE to the booster-box or CO DOES matter)

Most people with a 6 month old MoBo still have PCI LAN ie Realtec 8110 series (chip looks like lobster claws). MoBo with the 8111B chip is PCI-e.

And then theres people that have the Marvell LAN set up, which is GAGGING under Vista. Intel LAN chips need to be spec'ed at intel.com to determine PCI/PCI-e bus. For Intellifans there is an Intel PCI-e NIC card at TigerDirect.

way too beau coup info,
f61

 

[nhobo]

Simple: they are trying to manufacture a need where there is none, hoping to obsolete the last generation of computer hardware even faster than the previous one. It's a sucker's game, and long past time to turn it around and make suckers out of the manufacturers and marketing people who only want your money.

 

[yipsl]

maybe i am way wrong about the mobo desing but it always seems to me that the pci-e 1x slots are in silly places.

It varies, with my MSI motherboard, the PCIe x1 is on the other side of the PCIe x8, so when I get an 8800GTS, it will take a regular PCI slot away, not the PCIe.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ShowImage.aspx?Image=13-130-068-02.jpg%2c13-130-068-03.jpg%2c13-130-068-04.jpg%2c13-130-068-05.jpg%2c13-130-068-06.jpg%2c13-130-068-07.jpg%2c13-130-068-08.jpg&CurImage=13-130-068-04.jpg&Depa=0&Description=MSI+K9N6SGM-V+Socket+AM2+NVIDIA+GeForce+6100+Micro+ATX+AMD+Motherboard+-+Retail

I was thinking of getting a SATA/IDE controller as my board has only two SATA II and one IDE.

I'd really thought that PCIe x4 and x1 would be replacing PCI slots by now. So far, both IDE and PCI have held on longer than I expected, probably because of all the legacy hardware out there.

 

[rockyjohn]

Another useful PCI Express x1 card is one with eSATA connectors. Allows conventient connection of high speed external drives that are much faster than USB connected drives.

 

[yipsl]

I was thinking about one of those, but I can just go with a networked drive array next spring at income tax time, though that would be slower than eSATA, it would be usable by all 3 PC's on the home network.

Later on down the line, especially if hybrid SLI motherboards arrive, I'll try to get one that's not budget and has eSATA onboard when I go Agena.

 

[BUFF]

Any time a Lan is routed PCI opposed to PCI-e there is a performance hit.

yes, if Gigabit it will only do ~650MB/s as opposed to~900.
That's still waay faster than redential broadband or indeed faster than a single hard drive (probably still faster than most domestic RAID setups too)

Cable has the ability to be over-subscribed, and this increases noise and latency on the connection during busy periods. Your transfer rates go into the porcelain funnel. That doesn't happen with DSL. (But your DISTANCE to the booster-box or CO DOES matter)

oh DSL can be oversubscribed too if your ISP allows high contention ..
personally I prefer cable but ymmv.

 

[goldragon_70]

Plus you have the fact that Cable has far more room to expand speed, were as DSL has to work on compression (at least until the phone networks are revamped).