How many pcie slots do i need

You will notice that the motherboard above has 3 PCIe x16 slots two in silver color and there is one black colored x16 slot at the very bottom that may be hard to see. Here you will notice that mode 2 is great for SLI or Crossfire setup where you have two graphics cards.

The only issue is that both graphics card will work at reduced performance due to half the supported bandwidth. The difference as tested, however, between running the card in x16 or x8 is only marginal. Source: How Stuff Works. Several other slots were used to connect expansion cards to the motherboard before the introduction of the PCI slot in by Intel. PCI standard was created to alleviate the shortfalls of the previous buses that were at the time much slower and hence inefficient for the growing throughput demand of the expansion cards.

The PCI standard became more widespread towards the end of the 90s and saw some improvements. However, it was replaced by the more efficient PCI Express standard that has been in use since Image: Shows the difference between the older PCI standard using shared bus interface as compared to the newer PCIe that uses serial direct interface.

PCIe makes use of independent transfer lanes instead of the shared bus that the older PCI standard uses. The ability to transfer data in multiple lanes means an overall increase in bandwidth. Basically with the PCI parallel architecture, each connected device shared the same bus. The limitation here was that since every device shared the same bus, when a higher number of devices where to be connected, they would have to wait for the bus to free up to send and receive data. PCIe, on the other hand, completely changed the topology to a serial architecture where each and every device has its own dedicated bus now.

Unless you are observing issues it is unlikely you will notice the difference between the two Intel cards. As you are doubling the bandwidth, either should work fine. Your email address will not be published. You may use these HTML tags and attributes:. Which Intel processor? Pingback: Portable computers with expansion. Ranger says: July 22, at am. Gigabit internet is not 1 Gigabyte per second. James says: February 25, at am.

Perhaps they should just stop naming the lanes and other tech like USB with versions. All done. NoName says: June 7, at pm. Cornfused says: June 29, at am.

Bob Senzig says: August 4, at pm. Digi says: October 18, at am. Asus P7P55D with i5 Your machines will almost certainly speed up by using an NVME device. Digi says: June 7, at pm. Tomas says: October 25, at am. Gwyn Swamp says: December 1, at am. Justin says: December 31, at pm. Firewire and USB are measured in bits b , not bytes B. B byte or b bit makes a huge difference when describing bandwidth.

But 8 lanes are often plenty. Even though the theoretical data transfer limits of 8 and 16 lane slots are vastly different 2 , there is currently no consumer card on the market capable of saturating the bandwidth of a PCIe 3. Performance differences are mainly dependent on the card itself, and not the theoretical limits of the slot. Motherboards are designed with various amounts of PCIe lanes, and different processors are designed with support for certain amounts of lanes.

Server and enthusiast boards are typically designed with more lanes to provide more expandability, and CPU manufacturers segment their products similarly. For example, the Intel Core iK supports a maximum of 16 lanes, while the Core iXE supports a maximum of But bigger is not always better—the processors are simply designed for different environments. However, to complicate things further, there is such a thing known as a PCI Express Switch, which is a chip on some motherboards that is often said to double the number of lanes, but this is not strictly accurate.

This is a FREE software fortunately. Note that the following demonstration and sample is for checking PCIe version and slot on a laptop motherboard. For a desktop, the same procedure can work. Then, run it on your computer. Select the run file depending upon your system architecture.

This will open a small option window. This should open up a list of PCIe slot you have. Select any. On the right right hand side, it should tell you its information such as its size, as well as the version.

If the motherboard is new and has not yet been installed in a computer, or if it has already been installed but you can easily get access to it, you can go ahead and check the slots manually, and count them to find out just how many you have.

As mentioned earlier in this article, there are various PCIe slot sizes on the motherboard, denoted by X1, X4, X8, and X16 which refers to the number of lanes. You can take extra measures to avoid electrostatic damage. Once you have access to the motherboard, finding out exactly how many PCIe slots do I have will simply involve identifying the slots and counting them.

You may even identify the size of the slot if you need that information. While, as mentioned earlier, this is not the most accurate method for figuring out the type of PCIe slot you have, you can reduce your chances of error by understanding some general rules for consumer grade motherboard:.

As seen above, there are many ways to check how many PCIe slots do I have. If you are a new PC builder or if you are planning on installing a new device to your system, then understanding the PCIe slots is important. However, understanding PCIe slots is only one part of the equation.