I have an older computer that was given to me today, has a mother board with three white pci and one black pci x16. It also supports both SATA and the old ribbons. Still used the ribbon for the dvd rw, but had an SATA cable for the HDD.
So does the pci x16 stand for an express card, I thought they were orange and much larger. What kind of card could I put in there?
I doesn’t need anything really power full, it just needs to be a decent graphics card ((and hopefully cheap))!
So, when I go shopping for a card, do I say it is a pci express 16, or a pci x16.
If I plug pci x16 into google most of the hits say either pci , pci express, or pci express x16.
Also, how can I find out if it is a 1.0 or 2.0
Thanks for any help clearing this nomenclature up.
http://www.naplestech.com/shopcart/images/pc_slots.gif
That pic might help. Hopefully it’s pciepress x16 and not agp.
Assuming it is, cards are backwards compatible, so you don’t need to worry about which version you have.
What’s your budget? And do you plan to game on this machine, or is it for cad or 3d modeling?
I have other machines with about the same specs that play Fallout 3 and New Vegas quite well, with the addition of a graphics card.
They have one thing in common, they have the safety orange strip that I call the PCIe or PCI express. which if I am told correctly will accept many different PCI cards. The thing is that, the PC I am working on has a black strip that has PCI x16 tagged on it, and one of my HUGE, graphics cards seems to fit, but not quite. I would need to upgrade the power supply before I could use that one.
The games mentioned above would be around the limit of what I would try to play on it, It isn’t any good for anything more than surfing the net really right now.
The main reason it was given to me was that it still worked but didn’t have any go to it.
I replaced the 2 512 mb ram sticks with 3 1 GB sticks and it is running great again. Has a dual core AMD 64 2.2 Ghz I believe. Other than being made by Hewlett Packard, I really don’t have anything against it, other than being confused about the expansion slots. I started putting graphics cards in after PCI express was firmly founded and simply wouldn’t buy a computer that didn’t have that slot.
Checking NewEgg and TigerDirect, I see many different cheap cards touted as PCI (any description or variant of PCI x1 to express.
Seems I missed the edit window, the site I finally found says they are the same, x16 just refers to the bandwidth. Maybe I’ll just yank my 9500 out and see if it will work in there. Still take any advice that may be worth it to hand out though.
Thanks!