PCI and PCI-Express

[Frayed_Sanity]

I have an issue right now with my onboard sound - I need an optical input and my board doesn't have one. I have a couple of optical outputs, but I want an input so I can plug my multifx in using it's SPDIF toslink output.

BTW my motherboard is a Gigabyte P55A-UD3

Anyway. I wanted to know: Do the PCI slots and the PCI-Express slots share any lanes? I only have 16 PCI-Express lanes with my CPU - i7 860.

If I can get a PCI soundcard with optical-in instead of a PCI-Express x1 card which takes away some of my lanes from my video, all will be good with the world.

So yeah, that's my question. Do PCI and PCI-Express share anything? - lanes, bandwidth, bus etc...

 

[photonboy]

I could get into details, but I highly doubt using PCI or PCIe with a sound card would make a difference.

Probably the worst-case scenario would be that using the 2nd x16 slot (blue) would HALVE the available bandwidth to the first slot. I don't know if there's a graphics card when paired with that CPU which would be bottlenecked due to the lack of PCIe bandwidth.

You can however just choose another PCIe or PCI slot instead. I could be wrong, but I doubt they will matter to the bandwidth the first x16 slot provides.

*I'll post this for now, but I'm checking your manual right now to see if there are any reasons to think there will be a bandwidth issue and get back to you.

 

[photonboy]

http://download1.gigabyte.us/Files/Manual/mb_manual_ga-p55a-ud3_v2.0_e.pdf

I found the manual a bit confusing at first, but from what I can tell NOTHING you do can change the bandwidth allocated for the top "x16" slot.

The second x16 slot will allow "x4" mode if the "x1" slot below the top "x16" slot isn't used (not likely with most video cards anyway).

So from what I can tell it doesn't matter which slot you use to avoid issues with the top PCIe x16 slot throttling a good video card.

Do note the top "x1" slot requires a shorter card than the others, and also if you get a PCI (not PCIe) audio card the next motherboard you get will likely not support it. PCI is legacy and quickly disappearing.

So...

**Thus, unless I made a mistake, the "PCIEx4" (second blue) is probably the best choice.