I was interested in getting a soundcard recently, and I've been pondering whether to get a PCI or PCIe card. The PCI one would be cheaper so I'm leaning that way, but I want to be able to use it in my next build 3-5 years from now. Will PCI still be around by then?

I noticed that pretty much every mobo on sale today has good old PCI (many times even outnumbering PCIe slots), and this 4? 5? years after PCIe was introduced. I'm thinking this is a good sign (well, not if you want PCI to die that is )

i would probably get the pcie, it might last longer than pci, but no one is entirely sure how long tech will last.

well, if you look at ISA, you should get an idea.

http://images.anandtech.com/old/mo [...] 6ba+iv.jpg

If you look at that link, thats an P3 motherboard based on the intel i440BX chipset from the year 2000 or so. And if you look at the expansion slots closely you will see 1 AGP, 5 PCI and 2 ISA.

Now if you look at the modern board, you will see something like 1-2 16x pcie, 1-3 1x pcie, 1 4x pcie and 1-2 pci. If you compare that to what hte i440BX had you will notice something oddly familiar. replace 16x pcie with AGP and all hte other pcie with pci and the PCI with isa and u have hte i440Bx chipset...

So if history repeats itself, PCI has around 1-2 more years left in it before it dies from enthusiast boards and 2-3 for mainstream boards.

If you're going to keep it that long, get the PCIe version.

i think that nowadays you can find everything that used to be pci, a pcie version,, like tv tuner cards. you are far better off with pcie than pci.

That's a very good analogy you have there. I had forgotten all about ISA actually, but now that you mention it, it's pretty amazing that it lasted as long as it did. PCI today, though, seems to have a bit more life left in it, just judging from the amount of PCI peripherals still being sold.

Clearly though, it's better to look forward rather than back. Point taken.

I would not make whether the card is PCI or PCIe the determining factor, but the tech.

If the PCIe sound card has the same functionality and is equivalent (features/compatibility/DAC's, etc) as the PCI sound card, then get the PCIe card. Be careful because some of the early Creative X-Fi PCIe versions were stripped down versions of the PCI cards. But, the new Creative X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Professional (PCIe) actually has a real X-Fi chip and 64MB X-RAM

The new Asus ASUS Xonar D2X (PCIe) has gotten excellent reviews.

I would also recommend the AuzenTech Auzen X-Fi Prelude (PCI) as Auzentech has licensed the X-Fi chip from Creative.

Me personally, I would buy either the Asus or the Auzentech simply because of Creative's poor history of compatibility and driver issued, but that's me.

Lastly, PCI will be around long enough to make buying a PCI sound card worth it.

Good luck!

Yeah, I was actually looking at the Xonar D2/D2X. From the information I found, the Xonar D2 and D2X are exactly the same, save for a bridge chip on the D2X which makes it PCIe. That and the PCIe version needs an external power connector because it isn't getting the right type of power from the PCIe connection (and the proper on-card voltage modulation would have impacted sound quality).

Haven't had a Creative card in years, but wow! What a hornets nest they dug up with their driver mucking about and generally screwing their customers... part of the reason I'm looking somewhere else as well. Ironic, but I think their shenanigans is actually what has given us a rather exciting soundcard market lately

Thanks for the advice!

This topic has been moved from the section Overclocking to section Motherboards & Memory by Fredi