Hi Guys,

I'm about to put together a new system but, looking into upcoming 'new' tech's, I note that new GPUs will be in PCI Express '2' (PCI-E2) format.

Silly question, but should I be holding-out for a mobo which offers PCI-E2 compatibility if I plan on buying a new GPU in the next 6mths (e.g. NVIDIA's 9800 or something)?

I'm guess that the new cards will be backwards compatible with PCI-E?

Thanks for your help!

PCI-E 2 cards will be compatbile with current PCI-E 16x ,
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/mainb [...] 93804.html

G92 is supposed to be a refresh , its said it will be 8700GTS ,also no one knows when full PCI-E 2 cards will come out

I am hearing that PCIe 2.0 won't be utilised for another year cause the tech is one year away. On another note that even the mighty 8800GTX's aren't using every bit of PCIe 1.0 bandwidth, but pretty close though.

My thoughts on anyone looking at building a system in near future.


I would wait until Rev 2.0 boards are available with the following new technologies. I would expect to see these boards Rev 2.0 late winter or Spring 2008.

1. PCI Express 2.0- Due Q4 2007 for most part should double the pipeline for video card.

PCI Express Base 2.0 specification doubles the interconnect bit rate from 2.5 GT/s to 5 GT/s in a seamless and compatible manner. The performance boost to 5 GT/s is by far the most important feature of the PCI Express 2.0 specifications. It effectively increases the aggregate bandwidth of a 16-lane link to approximately 16 GB/s.


2. Hypertransport 3.0- Due out on boards Q4 2007

HyperTransport 3.0 extends the 1.4 GHz dual data rate (DDR) maximum clock of HyperTransport 2.0 to 1.8 GHz, 2.0 GHz, 2.4 GHz and 2.6 GHz, and delivers a maximum aggregate bandwidth of 41.6 gigabytes per second (GB/s) -- a bandwidth increase of 86 percent over HyperTransport 2.0

3. Next gen video cards above the 8800 series.


4. Esata connector- eSata is approximately 3 times faster than usb 2.0 or firewire connections. The only drawback with eSata is that it requires its own external power supply. I imagine they will implement these into the boards power.

I would hold off until Q2 2008 if you have a decent system now. The wait for these specs and new processors in the pipeline with higher cache levels and frequencies would be money well spent.

Regards,

J. Turner

Interesting! thanks for that, guys.
I'll check that out!

who would hold off until Q2 of 08? i mean even with sli of gtx, i doubt any gamers would wait till that long before theirs next upgrade.