PCI Express question

[teradost]

Sup everyone

I've been look at different motherboards for my system, and want something with PCI Express. However, all of the motherboards with PCI Express have either 1 or 2 "x16" slots and 2 or 3 "x1" slots.

How important is it to have the extra PCI Express x16 slot? And what kind of cards are being made for the PCI Express x1 slot? Basically, should I dish out bucks for the extra "x16" slot or stick it out with the "x1" slots?

A bonus question: are there motherboards coming out that have only the PCI Express slots? I plan on waiting a couple of months to see what Processor improvements AMD and Intel come up with before buying, and want to know whether there are new motherboards coming out as well

Thanks

[jbennet]

My radeon x600 gfx card is x16 but things like capture cards and gigabit NICs etc.... like a 1x or 16x

Regular PCI slots will be around for a long time as nearly every wifi card etc... is PCI

[zelkea]

If you are a gamer or require high-end graphics defiantly, go with PCI-E x16. The two PCI-E x16 slots are for the new technology called SLI Scalable Link Interface for Nvidia and Crossfire for ATI. This will allow you to piggy back two video cards for an additional 20-30% performance increase. Both video cards have to be identical in order for this to work.

As far as your bonus questions, yes the newer mobo’s only have PCI-E and PCI slots no AGP. I just picked up ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe which I am very happy with http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16813131013 .

Besides the SLI/Crossfire, technology there has been some huge improvements with mobo speeds and CPU’s. Mobo’s now have DDR2 800 with memory bus speed of 800Mhz compared to pervious 667Mhz, CPU’s now have a FSB Front Side Bus 2000/1600 MT/s, SATA II with 3.0 Gb/s versus 1.5 Gb/s, as well as SLI mentioned earlier.

Both AMD and Intel have dual core hyper-threaded 64 bit chips on the market Intel has just released there new line 07-27-06 and AMD decided to greet there new chip with a cut in pricing the chip I purchased dropped $150. This system I have is smoking I can boot into my desktop in under 30 seconds!!! If you have any other questions let me know.

AJZ