The PCI-express slot may not be a stranger to you, after all, that is the place where you insert your graphics card all the while. PCI-Express 2.0 isn’t any much different from its predecessor. In fact, if you are hoping for something totally different, then you are in for a disappointment. PCI-Express 2.0 is basically the same as PCI-Express 1.x, except for some improvement in its performance.

One year down the road after PCI-SIG announced the release of PCI-Express 2.0, we have started to see more and more PCI-Express 2.0 hardware appearing on the market. While it is still new, it is useful to understand what PCI-Express 2.0 is and how it affects you.

How PCI- Express works?

Just in case you have forgotten what PCI-Express is, it is a connection slot meant to replace both PCI and AGP slot. How PCI-Express works is based on the concept of lanes, analogous to highway lanes. The more lanes you have, the more traffic you can move. The number of lanes in a PCI-Express slot can start from 1 and a maximum of 16. The amount of traffic each lane can carry in a single direction is 250MB/s. This means that a PCI-Express 16x slot (16 lanes) has a maximum bandwidth of 250 x 16 x 2 = 8.0GB/s in dual direction. That is considered fast, compared to the previous PCI and AGP slot. Nowadays, most graphics cards are using the 16x PCI-Express to handle the heavy graphics processing and for 3D acceleration.

What has changed in PCI-Express 2.0?

In PCI-Express 2.0, the concept of lanes still exists. What has changed is that the width of the lanes has doubled. A PCI-Express 16x can now carry up to a 16 GB/s of data, up from 8GB/s in PCI-Express 1.x.

To fully utilize PCI-Express 2.0 and take advantage of the extra bandwidth, you will need both a PCI-Express 2.0 motherboard and a PCI-Express 2.0 compliant video card such as the GeForce 8800GT or the Radeon HD 4870. Luckily, PCI-Express 2.0 is designed to be both backward and forward compatible, which means that you can still use your new PCI-Express 2.0 video card on your old motherboard (or vice versa), although the speed will be restricted to the slower one.

Motherboards that support PCI-Express slot

PCI-Express 2.0 slot was first introduced with the short life Intel X38 chipset and is now being carried on by Intel’s X48, AMD’s 790/770 family and Nvidia’s nForce 7 series. Some great boards that support PCI-Express 2.0 include:

• EVGA nforce 780i SLI Motherboard
• MSI K9A2 Platinum Motherboard
• Asus Rampage Formula Motherboard

Do you really need PCI-Express 2.0?

With the extra bandwidth, one may expect a better PC and graphics performance. Sadly to say, that is not true, as yet. The situation is the same when Intel launched their quad core CPU. The technology is too fast for current applications to catch up. In the context of PCI-Express 2.0, most games are not designed to utilize the technology and even with both a PCI-Express 2.0 motherboard and graphics cards, you are not going to see huge improvement. At this point of time, it is not a ‘must-have’ feature, but if you are planning for a major upgrade of your system, then it will be worthwhile to include a PCI-Express 2.0 capable motherboard and video card in your plan.