What is Digg?Sponsored by Double Your Dating
The Best Way To Get A Woman To Pick YOU Up view!
doubleyourdating.com - Here’s how to get any woman to start a conversation with you. Can you say "Bye bye rejection..."???
48 Comments
- turpenine, on 10/12/2007, -1/+17i believe its mumbo jumbo.
- ohstoopid1, on 10/12/2007, -1/+16[homer]
mmm... gumbo *drool*
[/homer] - mtcantor, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14Whats "mumbo gumbo?"
Sounds delicious. - geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8"So that PCI-E x1 slot on my computer isn't just for show?"
Theoretically it'd be a great slot for sound cards, hard drive controllers, etc. However, hardly anyone is making them yet, because PCI-E cores are still a lot more expensive to license than PCI cores are, and motherboard manufacturers are still including standard PCI slots, for whatever reason. However, I believe Creative is finally jumping onboard PCI-E so maybe we'll see more PCI-E cards by year out. - Odweaver, on 10/12/2007, -3/+108.5/10, must have award, because it uses the PCI-E 1x slot?????
- themastersb, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6So that PCI-E x1 slot on my computer isn't just for show?
- spyrochaete, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5From the conclusion: http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/1045/9/page_9_benchmarks_final_thoughts/index.html
"It’s clear that you’re not going to be breaking any new 3DMark records with Galaxy’s GeForce 7300GT. While we didn’t want to put too much emphasis on straight out performance of the card, I expected it to perform slightly better than it did." - TWEAK, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8Anyone running any other PCI-E x1 graphics cards? Performed any similar tests?
- excession, on 10/12/2007, -4/+9If you're going to do this test, you should surely be also using a high-end graphics card, which due to its larger bandwidth requirements would be more likely to show up any potential performance differences? You cannot, from a low end card only, make any general conclusions as to the performance of PCIe x1 over x16.
also... http://duggmirror.com - pcgeek101, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5What about people that just want to hook up more monitors?
- KibibyteBrain, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4If used to do actual useful work in place of gaming, it could be a perfectly solid solution.
- GoCougs98, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5PCIe x16 is a total waste. It may kick a x1 links ass but no chipsets provide enough buffering to make it worthwhile and it is 3-4 times faster than a GPU's access to local RAM. Why do we have to pay extra $'s to Nvidia and others for what we don't need.
DDR3 1.6Gbit/sec
PCIe x16 64Gbit/sec (not actually achievable probably 60% of this number after 8b/10b encoding and packet efficiency losses) - jreno3, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4That was directed @tenderstorm
- Darksand, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Sorry? DDR3 1,6gb/s? the ati 9700pro already does 19.8 GB/sec and it has ddr. dont think so.
The 8800 GTX does 86.4 GB/Sec and i think it does it higher then 60%.
If the 16 pcie lines are faster then the vidmemory, why have vidmemory at all, we all know that the shared memory concept doesnt work, and i dont think its the memory itself, but the bus. - molochi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3The Palit site lists their 128MB 7300 at the speed of the card used in the comparison (600MHz). Their 256MB PCI-E x16 7300 card runs at 500MHz. It would be interesting to see how the card compared to an old PCI GF5500FX 256MB, AFAIK that was the last attempt on a "capable" gaming card for a suboptimal card slot..
- pcgeek101, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4I would love the ability to use a PCI-e 1x card .... most motherboards only have a couple PCI-e 16x slots at most .... how about making use of the 1x slots for more screen real estate goodness?
- Firehed, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Why was a clearly non-gaming-oriented card benchmarked with nothing but games? If you're buying a PCI-E x1 card (especially the low-end of this generation), it's almost certainly for the extra video outputs. Shouldn't testing have consisted of HD video content playback and 2d image quality?
- TWEAK, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5I just fixed that - thanks!
- strictnein, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3"You cannot, from a low end card only, make any general conclusions as to the performance of PCIe x1 over x16."
Completely false.
How about you RFTA? There is a huge performance difference with the low end card.
3dMark 2005:
@1024x768 - 4205 vs 2068
@1280x1024 - 3359 vs 1209
3dMark 2006:
@1024x768 - 2241 vs 450
Half Life 2 Lost Coast
@1024x768 - 86.25 vs 36.45 - tratten, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Cached print version:
http://www.tweaktown.com.nyud.net:8090/articles/1045/print/index.html - Darksand, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I didn't really get how much memory was on the x16 card, if it was also 128MB then its a bit of a harsh thing, because the cards need to swap out memory alot, it would be like a test of on-board cards, one with 16 lanes the other with just one, and ofcourse there will be a difference then, especially with the newer type of games, if the x16 one had 256MB, well also in that case the difference is obvious obvious.
A nice discussion would be, is the x16 pci-e throughput faster then the throughput of DDR3? a good game would load textures during the loading phase right? and during the game phase its all geometrical data over the bus, why else have that much mem oncard
Mumbo jumbo still - OBKenobi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2[quote]PCIe x16 is a total waste. [/quote]
Yes. Check the benchmarks of AGP cards vs. the same model PCI-e cards. There is no performance difference in games.
One thing that PCI-e has an advantage in is HD video, which requires more bandwidth than gaming. But PCI-e x8 is enough for that.
I don't know, maybe they're just future-proofing the standard, but then why are they already working on PCI-e 2.0?
That's right, the old hardware obsolescence shell game. - molochi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2PCI-E x16 was, like everything before it, born nearly obsolescent. PCI-E is only 2.5Gbits (~320MBytes) per second per channel. PCI-Ex16 is only 5GBPS. PCI-E v2 will only double that. A dual channel DDR800 memory setup currently has the capacity for almost 13GBPS and by the time PCI-E 2.0 rolls around the memory will be even faster.
The benchmarks on the 7300 show pretty clearly that current games don't like a PCI-E x1 card with only 128MB of memory when they run just fine on a x16 version of the same card. I happen to still be using an AGPx8 card in my gaming rig and I works fine for BF2, Oblivion,when I upgrade again I will not be begging for a PCI-E x8 interface that saves me $1 on the price of a mobo just so it would show its limitation SOONER. However, I would be interested in board with (2) PCI-E x16 and (2) PCI-E x8. - mebob, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Quite a few machine where made with integrated graphics and only have a mix of slots other than x16 or are doomed with just x8 and 32-bit PCI.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Hmm, actually, it seems it is closer to 0.244 GB/s (in each direction) because of overhead. I'm not sure how the full-duplex thing affects bandwidth, but assuming it doubles it, that's 0.488 GB/s. That's still only 49% of AGP4x, so it's more like AGP2x.
- nfollmer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Not exactly sure about the whole specs behind SLI so if this question sounds dumb (well its because it is), but anyway...... Could this be further expanded so you could use a 16x PCI-e and a 1x PCI-e in SLI mode? Or would the 1x actually hinder more than help?
- strictnein, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2@geminitojanus:
With a more powerful graphics card the performance difference between the 1x and the 16x would grow. The limits being displayed by the 16x card in this comparison are with the graphics processor on the card. - LordSpam, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I think they need to tweak their website to have less crap on it. Seriously I had to look to read that actual article. And for the love of all that is holy can someone please stop the pop up keyword text ads?? They aren't even relevant to the word. For example on this site if you highlight "graphics" on page 2 you get an Intel C2D ad. Yeah, that makes sense.
- frase, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Not exactly sure why anyone would bother, except, as they suggest, to add more monitors to a setup.
The card is the same size as its PCI-E siblings, and the price difference is probably negligible. And in what situations do you find yourself with a PCI-E 1x slot but not a 16x for graphics? - geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I think it'd be interesting to see what a 4x version of this card could do; coupled with a motherboard with 4-4x slots and one 16x slot (for gaming I suppose, or running a physics accelerator, or something who knows), it'd be quite the desktop setup.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I don't think there was an error in the testing. Are you aware of the maximum bandwidth of PCIe x1? According to Wikipedia, it's 2.5 Gbit/s (0.3125 GB/s or 31.25% that of AGP 4x - "AGP 1.25x" if you will).
- Cowboy5995, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"s it AGP 4x vs. 8x marketing mumbo gumbo all over again?"
I have a 4x agp slot and I can tell you their is a difference to what I can play. - geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2The connections are completely different between 1x and 16x PCI-e; they talk the same protocol, but the connectors have to be different because of the different power requirements for cards with larger PCI-e numbers. Some cards that would be perfectly happy sitting in a 1x slot draw too much power and are pushed to using 4x slots, for example.
- mitrovarr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1geminitojanus: "Some cards that would be perfectly happy sitting in a 1x slot draw too much power and are pushed to using 4x slots, for example."
I can't imagine why they wouldn't just stick a power connector on it - either a standard molex or one of those video-card power connectors that's standard on high-end cards. - dark_helmet, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2"It would have been even nicer to see some HDMI cables but unfortunately there is no HDMI support."
you can adapt DVI to HDMI, they're just not going to include extremely expensive cables with a budget card. - GoCougs98, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Modern chipsets don't come close to the buffering required to sustain maximum throughput on a x16 link. Maximum burst sizes are on the order of 256-bytes per request. Only a couple of kbytes of outstanding requests are allowed at a time.
- drakino, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The advantage of graphics vendors eyeing 1x cards is that it would be possible for Expresscard graphics cards for laptops when used at a desk. I know there is already an expansion dock coming out when a graphics system, and also some things hanging off the USB 2 bus provided by expresscard slots.
- geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1It is interesting to note, however, that the 16x drop in bandwidth didn't occur a 16x drop in performance as you would expect if the card scaled perfectly, which means the 16x version of this card is, well, useless. Let's hit the numbers:
3dMark 2005:
@1024x768 - 4205 vs 2068 = approx 1/2.
@1280x1024 - 3359 vs 1209 = approx 1/3
3dMark 2006:
@1024x768 - 2241 vs 450 = approx 1/5
Half Life 2 Lost Coast
@1024x768 - 86.25 vs 36.45 = approx 1/4
Which says if we put one of these cores on a 4x card, it should (very approximately) saturate the capabilities of the card, freeing that 16x lane for something more productive. - mydave, on 07/24/2008, -0/+0In the article there are three key reasons why a PCI-E x1 graphics card can work and we’ll show you why.
http://www.shpe-sac.org
http://www.ocflex.com/
http://www.trgovinca.org
http://www.chasr.org/ - qazwaz, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2I have an ati x600 in an x1 slot.
It was a coworkers card, and was overheating and freezing in a 16x slot.
Two options for installing are to remove the end of the slot itself. It is just plastic, so it melt easily with a soldering iron. If you cut it out you need to be careful of the pins in the slot. They are quite fragile, and a good bump with a saw could bend them.
I didnt have a soldering iron handy ( at work ) so I cut a new slot out of the edge connector of the card itself. The PCB is very easy to file away, I used the file on my leatherman. It is just the right width to cut the slot in the connector using the rough edge of the saw.
The card fits very neatly, and works perfectly. It doesnt overheat or freeze anymore. Note that Im primarily using it to get two more monitor outs.
Of course, you could just get a Mac Pro, which uses 16x physical connectors for all four slots, and has software routable allocation of bandwidth to those slots. - jreno3, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3you need to stay out of your computer's case.........
- geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1That part is obvious, but fitting the core to the lane-count was one of the design points of PCI Express: no card should use more than it needs. That's why on the chipset side of things, it's simply a number of lanes, and it's up to the motherboard manufacturers to decide how they want to lay those lanes out. With a higher performing core, use more lanes, it's that simple (for example, 4-8x lanes instead of 2-16x lanes). With a little more planning, this card could have been an excellent card, however, putting it in a 16x slot or a 1x slot is entirely wasteful, either wasting PCI Express bandwidth that could be used for more peripherals, or wasting core performance on an entirely too slow interconnect.
- Yashu, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Could there have been an error in the testing?
That is a BIG difference! and with an extremely budget graphics card... the 7300.
There are some 7300gt cards that were lower clocked 7600gs cards and it is possible that this is what they tested against. I just find it hard to beleive there would be such a huge difference.
In the AGP 4X vs 8X debate there really WASN'T a difference at the time... we are only now using cards that use full agp 8X. But the 7300 is not one of those cards. Unless it is one of the rebadged 7600 cards... and there are more then a few of those around. - mitrovarr, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I think it fits a pretty tiny niche - it's only a good idea if you need better performance than integrated video and have some sort of ridiculously cheap and crappy motherboard that doesn't possess anything better than a PCI-E 1x slot for video improvement. The 16x version of the same card just destroyed it.
I guess it could also be useful if you really need more than the two monitors a 16x card will give you, but that's not exactly a lot of people either. - tenderstorm, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2Is it possible to stick x16 graphics card into x1 and be happy? I know there is physical restriction but if you break that tiny plastic barrier?
- petrocket, on 10/12/2007, -4/+0wayyyyyy too many ads on this page. really annoying
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -10/+5SUMMARY OF ARTICLE
PCI-E x1 is *****. - JungleGeorge, on 10/12/2007, -9/+1RTFA?
Regional Fuel Tax Agreement?
Request For Technical Assistance?
Reserve Forces Training Area?
Reverse Fault Tree Analysis?
Roaring Fork Transit Agency?
Oh, (R)ead (F)-ing (T)he (A)rticle ! Thank you for indulging my silliness strictnein. I agree with you, the typo (and the resultant acronyms) just made me snort.
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is