So what else is PCIe good for?

[Oxalid]

Has anyone seen any announcements of PCIe products other than video cards?

I'm planning on building a AMD64 system in the near future and trying to decide whether I should wait for the PCIe boards. With most motherboards integrating Ethernet, RAID drive controllers, and sound - what are we going to stick in those 1x slots?

The obvious application I see that could use the added bandwidth is sound cards. I've never been a fan of integrated sound except for the nForce2 SoundStorm, but I don't see any news of upcoming products that are for PCIe.

If I decide to go PCIe, I'm thinking I'll just grit my teeth and use onboard sound until these cards become available - hopefully by the end of Q1 '05.

If anyone has seen info on any 1x cards, sound or otherwise, please share.

 

[Crashman]

Sound cards don't need it. But think about this: PCIe x1 is nearly 2 gigabits in each direction, while PCI was 1 gigabit total. So things like Gigabit network adapters, SCSI cards, other RAID cards, and various less-common interface cards can all benenfit from Gigabit. If you had a 4-channel SATA RAID controller in RAID5, it would easily benefit from the higher speed. Oh, and BTW, even onboard add-on controllers are using PCI or PCIe interfaces, so any way you look at it, PCIe will matter.

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