The arrival of PCI Express to the graphics scene has caused quite a stir to the enthusiast community. Here we have a new technology that is destined to replace the long established AGP and PCI. What exactly is PCI Express and what’s so promising about it?

Well I can bore you with so much techno stuff as to this new PCI Express architecture or I can just sum it up for you. PCI Express equals High bandwidth per pin, Low overhead and Low latency. The old PCI bus worked at 133Mbps with read and write sharing the same bandwidth while a PCI Express X1 provides 250Mbps read and write on a dedicated bandwidth per slot. As for the graphics department, the old AGP bus currently maxes out at 2.1Gbps (8xAGP) while the PCI-E X16 counterpart provides up to 4Gbps of bandwidth. Almost doubling that of the 8xAGP. Not only that, the bandwidth of a PCI Express link may be linearly scaled by adding signal pairs to form multiple lanes. The physical layer supports x1, x2, x4, x8, x12, x16 and x32 lane widths. What this means for graphics card manufacturers is the reality of producing even more powerful cards that can handle more data and smoother graphics. For a more in-depth understanding of the PCI-Express architecture, there’s a mountain of information here.