What kind of PCIe cards can you get?

[voiidwulf]

Hi.

What kind of PCI-e cards can you get? I know there are 802.11 b/g/n Wifi cards, and USB cards, but what else is there available? Also, what can you put in a 5.25inch drive other than an optical drive? My case has 4 and I'm only using one for my DVD burner.

I'm just trying to see if I can make use of all those extra slots.

Thanks,

 

[amuffin]

You can put fan controllers and many other goodies in there

 

[Pinhedd]

If you're an avid gamer or audiophile and you're not using an external receiver you can get a PCIe sound card which will be a vast improvement over the motherboard's onboard sound.

Amongst other things:

1. Additional storage controllers / RAID controllers (including eSATA, Fiberchannel, and SAS)

2. System management cards (my favorite)

3. Graphics cards (duh)

4. network cards (ethernet or wifi)

5. high speed enterprise SSDs (extremely expensive)

6. USB, serial, parallel, firewire expansions

7. multimedia card readers

8. Infiniband (lol)

 

[voiidwulf]

If you're an avid gamer or audiophile and you're not using an external receiver you can get a PCIe sound card which will be a vast improvement over the motherboard's onboard sound.

Amongst other things:

1. Additional storage controllers / RAID controllers (including eSATA, Fiberchannel, and SAS)

2. System management cards (my favorite)

3. Graphics cards (duh)

4. network cards (ethernet or wifi)

5. high speed enterprise SSDs (extremely expensive)

6. USB, serial, parallel, firewire expansions

7. multimedia card readers

8. Infiniband (lol)

Whats a System Management Card?

 

[Pinhedd]

Whats a System Management Card?

system management cards are cards which allow administrators to control and monitor the machine remotely without going through the OS. They're more common in specially designed workstations and servers manufactured by OEMs such as Dell and HP. Typically they work over TCP/IP and are accessed through a web interface. They provide a remote KVM interface, virtual drive mounting, power control, system diagnostics, etc...

 

[voiidwulf]

Oh, I definitely don't need one of those.

 

[voiidwulf]

Best answer selected by VoiidWulf.