Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Hardware and Software => Topic started by: ketinkrad on May 03, 2009, 05:59:20 PM
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Which is the better sound card interface? PCI Express Interface or PCI Interface.
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PCI Express? Isn't that just for the video card?
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PCI Express? Isn't that just for the video card?
PCI-E Sound cards are for PCI-E x1 slot, never seen one for a x16 slot. :)
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The PCI-E 1x slot offers bandwidth of up to 250Mb/s, while PCI is 133Mb/s.
I have no idea if even top of the line stuff (outside of professional audio) requires that much bandwidth. I know Creative makes X-Fi cards in both PCI-E and PCI variants. I can't imagine there being any real performance differences between the two. I suppose if all your PCI slots were occupied and all you had left was a PCI-E 1x slow, I'd go for it. Otherwise, whichever is cheaper IMO.
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My sound card uses a PCI-E x1 (granted I use it in a PCI-E x16 slot) and it seems to work fine. As far as which is better I don't think it's going to matter with a sound card and I would go with what Fulmar said.
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I am surprised the techs out there have not explained which is better?
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I use a pci-e sound card. More bandwidth. However, to be honest I really don't know which is best.
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Like many things, it will usually depend on the card. Generally speaking a single lane PCI-E card is going to consume more bud bandwidth for the CPU as the single lane PCI-E card interface is slower than the PCI bus.
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PCI is faster than PCI-E?
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I guess I should clarify that. It depends on which revision of the PCI-E standard we are talking about and the speed of the PCI bus we are talking about.
A 66Mhz PCI bus moves data at roughly 266MB/s.
A single lane PCI-E 1.0 bus moves data at roughly 250MB/s.
A 133Mhz PCI bus moves data at roughly 533MB/s.
A single lane PCI-E 2.0 bus moves data at roughly 500MB/s.
A 133Mhz PCI-X (64bit) bus moves data at roughly 1066MB/s.
Now, that is raw speed. Overhead is higher with PCI-E due to it being a serial stream, it takes multiple hardware interrupts to deal with 4 bytes of data. For PCI it is one interrupt per 4 bytes of data on a 32 bit PCI bus. There is more overhead for PCI-E to convert from/to serial to/from parallel memory bus as well, although that is pretty low.
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I guess I should clarify that. It depends on which revision of the PCI-E standard we are talking about and the speed of the PCI bus we are talking about.
A 66Mhz PCI bus moves data at roughly 266MB/s.
A single lane PCI-E 1.0 bus moves data at roughly 250MB/s.
A 133Mhz PCI bus moves data at roughly 533MB/s.
A single lane PCI-E 2.0 bus moves data at roughly 500MB/s.
A 133Mhz PCI-X (64bit) bus moves data at roughly 1066MB/s.
Now, that is raw speed. Overhead is higher with PCI-E due to it being a serial stream, it takes multiple hardware interrupts to deal with 4 bytes of data. For PCI it is one interrupt per 4 bytes of data on a 32 bit PCI bus. There is more overhead for PCI-E to convert from/to serial to/from parallel memory bus as well, although that is pretty low.
Sure didn't know that. Just assumed their was greater bandwidth. I guess I was going on the PCI-e theory that video cards had greater bandwidth and not taking into account the bus versions.
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Video cards (for the most part) use 16 lanes, not one lane, of the PCI-E bus. In this case, it is one interrupt per 2 bytes per clock cycle, instead of one interrupt per 8 clock cycles (1 byte).
So far, all the sound cards I have seen using the PCI-E bus, have used only one lane.
The hardware to implement PCI-E is much cheaper than PCI is.
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Sure didn't know that. Just assumed their was greater bandwidth. I guess I was going on the PCI-e theory that video cards had greater bandwidth and not taking into account the bus versions.
TheZohan could have told you that. Surprised he didn't jump in. He is A+ certified after all.