Pcie x4 electrical and pciex1 ?

[Anton]

So I've been looking at the ABIT IP35 Pro LGA 775 Motherboard, It has everything I want and it has great reviews by hundreds of people.

This has always stumped me, theres two PCIx16 and one of them is electrical 4x.. what does that mean?

And It also has a pciex1 , does that mean i can put a x1 gfx card in it or something? Or maybe a pciex1 compatible Card of some sort?

[SL1CK1337]

I think the pcie 4x and 1x are used for sound cards and tv cards, i dont think there are many of that kind out yet.

[Anton]

Oh ok, Thanks! +REP for the help!

[legionaire45]

The PCI-Express 16x slot has 16 PCI Express lanes on it and is used for graphics cards and occasionally really high end RAID cards. The 4x slot on that board has the same form factor as the 16x slot but only has 4 PCI Express lanes wired up electrically, which means it doesn't have enough bandwidth to support a video card in most cases (I think it will boot, but windows will bitch about the slot it is on, not positive on that though), however there are some PCI Express 4X devices out there such as network cards, Firewire cards, etc. and all 4X slots can use PCI-Express 1X devices.

More here. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express)

[Mr Buckshot]

Video cards will only work in the PCI-e x16 slots. Since PCI-e is backwards compatible with regular PCI, the x4 and x1 slots will support any peripheral that was originally created for the regular PCI bus, including those crappy video cards. The x4 and x1 slots are meant for stuff like sound cards, TV tuners, wireless adapters, etc.

[legionaire45]

Video cards will only work in the PCI-e x16 slots. Since PCI-e is backwards compatible with regular PCI, the x4 and x1 slots will support any peripheral that was originally created for the regular PCI bus, including those crappy video cards. The x4 and x1 slots are meant for stuff like sound cards, TV tuners, wireless adapters, etc.
...what? PCI and PCI Express are completely different and are not even close to being backwards compatible with each other. If you want to get a PCI device to work on a PCI Express interface you need to add expensive bridge chips or completely rework the product to support PCI Express, hence why Creative hasn't shitted out a PCI Express XFI -- they are having problems getting the card to work properly because of bus overhead issues. At least a few months ago the only PCI Express wired network card I could find was close to $80 and only had 1 gigabit port, which definately shows that it is expensive for them to make a custom product for PCI Express considering there was nothing that looked roughly remote to it.

*EDIT/CLARIFICATION* The commands are backwards compatible, hence why you would have a bridge chip to convert the electrical signals.