Other things I have put into PCIe x1 slot: - M.2 drive in a vertical slot. It limits bandwidth, but it's fine for light use. As a bonus, if you use 2230 size drive it fits in 1U rack case and most ITX-sized or thin client sized cases. - Serial and parallel port adapters. They are still used widely for industrial applications, and in engineering - Firewire card. It was used for debugging Windows kernel drivers. You can use USB 3.0 for this, now. - TV Tuner / capture card. To my surprise they are still manufactured. - Oscilloscope interface card - that's clearly very industrial use case, along with other signal analysers - M.2 carrier board with x1 to x4 lane for one nvme drive, and two other AHCI M.2 drives, located on the other side of PCB, with SATA connectors on the edge to connect to motherboard - 2.5" HDD carrier, which required only SATA connector to the board, and pulled power from PCIe slot. Very clean solution. - two-drive 2.5" HDD carrier, which had on-board SATA controller, therefore requireing no cables at all - SAS Expander. It's basically port multiplier for SAS - has input and output ports, it takes power from PCIe and presents small device for monitoring and management to host system. Btw SATA can also be multiplied, one SATA port can address 5 disks. - 16-camera analog monitoring system, with 16 BNC and RS-485 connectors for grabbing and controlling PTZ on remote cameras. And, yes, x1 port PCIe 2.0. 500 MB/s is excessively enough for 16 VGA streams, especially already encoded to MPEG-2. - 4G LTE card. Kind of same as with WiFi (also requires separate USB cable), but also has SIM card slot. Technically you can use any WiFi carrier card, and and interposer with a SIM slot. - A fan. Literally a GPU-sized PCB with two slim fans cleverly mounted on it, blowing upwards through PCB into card above it or CPU area, took power from PCIe slot. - card reader. Technically it was front panel-mounted, but there was teeny-tiny x1 PCIe "card" with microscopic USB controller on it, and ribbon cable leading to the front panel bay, which housed actual card slots. It had literally everything, from Sony's MagicStick, RS-MMC, SDXC and microSDXC, CF I/II (including Microdrive!), CFast, XD, and more, and had decent speeds. - AGEIA PhysX card. Dell has PCIe version of it. I will always scoff at motherboard manufacturers that leave empty places where x1 slots could be, and not leaving their backs open, so x4 or longer card could be inserted.
Serial ports are massively used in some industries like railways, factories, science laboratories and R&D. We use them at work all the time - one PC has 8 serial ports available (4 PCIe X1 cards all in a row), it was cheaper than Moxa and USB adapters are often less reliable
You know when you hear that accent, you're about to get educated. No BS, no cringe and obnoxious filler, and no jump cuts ever 2 seconds. Thank you so much for this. 💖
I learned more in a few minutes than i would have looking all of this up myself. Thank you for saving me so much time and frustration. Very well taught, spoken, and described!!! 🙌👏👏
Great and informative video. I just wanted to add just a few bits of additional information. In a SLI/Crossfire motherboard, The top PCI-E 16x slot closest to the CPU has 16 lanes, the other blue 16x slot further below (farther away from the CPU) is a 16x PCI-E slot with only 8 lanes. You can visually see this, where you can see the pins stops in the middle and the rest of the slot is just plastic. Those 8 lanes from that slot connects directly to the last 8 lanes of the top PCI-E 16x slot. So if you plug anything into this slot, even a 1x PCI-E device, than the top 16x slot will be downgraded from 16 lanes to 8 lanes in the BIOS, since they can't both use those lanes at the same time. So If you have a high end GPU in the top 16x slot, I highly recommend you don't plug anything into the other 16x slot below unless you absolutely have to. In this video, the bottom 16x slot is just a 4x PCI-E that connects to the chipset, so it won't downgrade the 16x to 8x.
Yeah, youre right, but some gen3 slot with 8 lines and fastest single gpu will work maybe 98% speed if card is put to 16x (100%) speed. I'am right? I don't have number's but gen3 x8 is faster than. Gen1 x16 I think. But how wide is your way, dosen't tell everything. And in RAM sticks, ddr3 vs ddr4 there's much misleading. Ram speed in Hz rise, so do 'latency' in stick's, so ram itself could even slow some weird cases when 'upgrade' stuff. I have old ddr3 16gbytes x6 and some ddr2 were faster at test's and ddr4 didn't be much better, it's confusing sometimes. But now we talking about pci-e's. At least today's many computer have just graphics, other stuff is integrated. Some ISA slot's era, nothing was integrated. Not even printer port or hard drive controllers. If you want some floppy drive to your computer, it need to connect a some sort of card. Soundcard's were just starting to shape back then.. This board in video still having normal pci's, those are gone today.
Yeah a lot of people out there not realising their device is maybe only working at half speed. That or can't work out why their USB3.1 ports stopped working.
Well damn, I didn't know this, that's kinda dumb but thanks for sharing. I'm glad I haven't put anything in that slot, especially as it's an older PCIe 3.0 motherboard with an RTX 4070! I'd lose a ton of performance if it went down to 8 lanes. Definitely something worth remembering.
It depends on the board. There are some where the "primary" slot has 16 lanes but will be split in multi GPU, there are some where the primary runs from the CPU and the other slot from the chipset (so no splitting, the primary card stays in x16, but the other can run in whatever the board offers) Performance difference between x16 and x8 is generally no concern. There is a drop, but that is so small, that it is hardly noticeable between the microstutter and other bottlenecks.
Great video for an intro to this slot. Although rare, there are also graphics cards available in x1. I have an Nvidia NVS-300 which has dual DVI output using only an x1 slot. This is useful in PCs where your want another 'low use' monitor to be used for your desktop, but to not take graphics RAM from your primary card.
I have just such an application in use. I resurrected an old eMachine to run some older software under XP (won't run right on a 64-bit platform) and have a 1x NVS-300 in it. It works remarkably well driving two monitors (I'm using the DVI to dual-vga setup). Though I'm under no illusions that this would be a game platform even in its day, lol.
Thank you so much for this video, ngl, i had no idea what that slot was even for and I was hunting everywhere for a video like this one, very detailed and you made it very easy to understand for a new pc user (like me) to catch on quickly, thank you 😊
Never had much tech savvy so I learnt a ton from this simple and easy to grasp explanation. Great video, now I understand a motherboard better. Thanks and God bless
Excellent video, straight to the point without all the bells and whistles and constant requests to subscribe, wish they were all made like this. I'm going to be putting a new PC together soon so have subscribed keep up the good work
Clear tutorial. Easy explanations. Good visuals. I came here to learn if I can use a PCIe X1 to connect more HDDs and if the pcie lane can allow the speeds to read them at the same time. Although I didn't find an answer to my question, I watched the whole video. Nicely made!
Thank you so much, i have been looking at what upgrades I can do to my PC and you have given me clarity on the subject. I will be adding a Capture card and USB ports for my devices!
You did not cover all cases here. Total amount of available number of PCIe lanes and the source of the PCIe capabilities - some of it is chipset based and some of it CPU based. Integrated devices get some lanes to themselves as well. Also, not only PCIe splitting, but the PCIe switching is a thing as well.
@@CajunReaper95 I didn’t think I was wrong. I mean, the video was specifically about the use cases for a x1 slot. Availability of more PCIe lanes, where they come from, how they’re possibly switched, or anything else is pretty irrelevant to how you can potentially use just one lane. Although, he did touch on splitting a little with one of the x1 adapters that he showed. The one that had 4 more x1 slots, and he said that you won’t get any more bandwidth than the initial x1 available to the card.
You can do worse than that. The PCIe bus is backwards compatible, latency and delay tolerant to strange degrees. When some hacking teams were starting to hack into the PS4, one of the people had the idea of using the PCIe bus as a serial connection and that worked. In his words, it was essentially PCIe x0.0000001.
My PC might be a bit on the older side, but it had 2 PCI slots, a PCIe x16 slot, an x16 sized x8 slot, an x16 sized x4 slot, and 2 x1 slots. I have the graphics card in the x16 slot (Obviously), a TV Tuner/Video capture card in the 1st x1 slot, a WiFi card in the 2nd 1x slot, and an NVMe SSD in the x4 slot. Other devices I've had plugged into the computer, but not currently attached include a SATA card, USB 3 card and a Parallel/Serial port card.
You just explained a reason to have a full size case and ATX motherboard which allows all those slots. I have one. You can't go wrong with a lot of slots and SATA ports and USB 2 & 3 ports. Reminds me of when the Apple II had eight card slots, as well as the Imsai and Altair computers. You had to use a card and slot to add just about anything like sound cards, etc.
@@vancejochim8537 I do like full size cases. Though if I was building a PC today, the cards would probably be different. I doubt I'd need the PCIe M.2 card, because modern motherboards tend to have at least 1 onboard, but I might need a SATA card instead. I'd probably also not need a WiFi card either, as that would most likely also be onboard, or in one of those micro PCIe slots on the motherboard.
Wonderfully clear and exhaustive. Such technically clean presentations are rare in UA-cam. I am buying a new Workstation with other PCI slots and I needed this info sorely. Thanks a lot.
No worries about the old school board. My 2014 rig is still running PCIE 2.0 but will read contemporary SSD NVM adapters and therefore I am currently using SSDs with and AM3+ MOBO. EDIT: meaning PCIe is, in fact, backwards AND forward compatible, with regards to power & data transfer as I researched prior to getting those NVM adapter cards... The amount of power and data transfer will of course be dictated by the specs/generation of your MOBO and data lane capabilities, etc.
"PCIe is, in fact, backwards AND forward compatible" not really. For instance MB GB Aorus Elite DDR4 won't recognise neither AMD FirePro V5800 nor Radon HD6450 till Windows starts so you won't be able to see the MB BIOS interface with neither one of those cards. This is not what we expect from a "backward compatibility" definition. This happens on many recent motherboards regardless of what PCI-E settings such as PCI-E version are selected in the BIOS. All the standards are just recommendations so it's all up to the HW manufacturers whether to follow them or not.
@Jei Cynth i tried an NVMe Expansion Adapter card for M.2 NVMe of 1TB a WD/Black, motherboard an Asus Prime Z-390-A NoN 4x Pcie capable i connected the M.2 NVMe 1TB Drive and was rather disappointed it Ran Slower then the current Hard Drive 7200 RPM wasn't understanding why even tried the other Appropriate slots for the PCIe Adapter card but the No Avail... so i gave up i don't know if i had to go into Bios to arrange setting in there🤷♂ think i did but either not help. If you have any info or Advice as to why i was not receiving better Speeds i'd Greatly a Appreciated👍🏻 P.S. Hope i made sense as to what i was Referring to...
@@ThisOLmaan hmmm only thing off top of my head is what are you CPU & RAM specs? My 2014 rig has 32Gigs Ram and 4.00 nom ghz processor I believe... Something Vishera, I'll have to lookup that newegg order.
@@NeinFeline : i have the Asus Prime Z390-A motherboard, i5-9600k, 32 Gb Ram, the motherboard supports 2 M.2 NVMe's but wanted to add another in one of the PCIe slots, and like i mentioned the speed where slower then a Hard Drive, even though my motherboard does not support Gen 4.0 i was still getting pretty fast Transfer Rates in there respective m.2 slots.
just to add my 2 cents to this discussion. PCIe backward compatability can be seen from 2 side's. From the card and from the motherboard. Motheboards(actualy the processor and/or chipset) generaly support all all older PCIe versions. So an old add-in card will still link up and work. The other way arround cannot be said. Newer card's don't always work in older boards. I have read somewhere that from a certain generation nvidia cards PCIe 2.1 is the minimum they require and AMD cards will still work all very ancient PCIe 1.0 boards. Why PCIe 2.1? That is when a change was made to the PCIe on the wire signaling. For why and old graphics card does not show an image when powering on the machine. That is rather simple. Those cards boot rom's don't contain an UEFI drive and only have 16-bit BIOS code. To allow old cards to work UEFI uses CSM to allow it to interface with that old 16-bit BIOS. So if CSM is turned off... no display until an graphics driver initialises the card.
There are also X1 cards for dial-up modems, some that are mpcie adapter cards for like cellular modems, and there are I/o cards such as serial and parallel ports.
Interesting but not many would bother, and it'd be plenty easy and cheap to just to use a regular PCI dial up modem and no disadvantage in terms of performance, many modern boards in recent times still include a regular PCI slot for legacy. And not many would have a serial/parallel port (maybe you'd have a ancient printer/scanner you'd want to still use or something) But even if its true many would probably just use a cellular router then connect with a regular wifi card to that. Then again they probably only bother with that if the motherboard doesn't already have a header for serial/parallel ports (some would for the legacy option) And of course there's the option to run a old machine that has them natively for just as cheap if not cheaper.
@@patg108 except boards now do not come with PCI slots. PCIe or USB or go home is the approach now. Has been for a few years. Frankly you're an idiot if you're rocking an infernal modem for anything beyond a fax machine anyway!! v90 serial was the beast .. even flex was ok.
@@NullaNulla i'm certain you're mistaken about PCI, there probably is the oddball modern motherboard that includes a regular old PCI slot or 2. I'm well aware its in decline but last i saw a few months ago i could find a board or 2 with one. And I agree but dial up has a few more uses, Mainly for oddball legacy things like connecting a dreamcast to play online or similar consoles or just for novelties. And i was saying why waste the PCI-E slot instead of the PCI with that? And i wouldn't rock a dial up modem be it v90 or v92 or whatever. It'd only be in use for a very niche case scenario and nothing else.
@@patg108 "And i was saying why waste the PCI-E slot instead of the PCI with that?" I do agree with there if there is a PCI slot on the board. I don't doubt there is oddballs around still with PCI but they're far from the norm now. I grew up with 16bit ISA and have experience back to the Commodore VIC20, what I see now is so far ahead with USB actually being reliable now, USB storage media being reliable and so on, I could have never dreamed of this all them years ago. I could foresee some things like better laptops and laptops becoming more the norm for folks but my Note10+ with it's stylus (even just the linux based computer as a phone) never even crossed my mind. So imagine my surprise when PCI, parallel and serial started disappearing.
LAVA Computer (Canada) Dual Serial PCIe cards. Works very well. Long-term company (40+ years). No hardware or software issues after 10+ years using their PCIe card.
Around 2017 I bought a SSD, but my 2008 HP dc5850 only supported SATA-2 running at 300MB/s. So I bought a $8 Chinese SATA-3 PCIe x1 card. Unfortunately the system only supported PCIe 2.0, so I only achieved ~400MB/s for the SSD (530MB/s). To be honest the Chinese card complained about PCIe 2.0 during the boot process, but I was happy with a 33% throughput improvement for $8.00.
@@lucasrem Still much faster than a HDD. besides the main advantage of the SSD is not the throughput, but the fact that it has no mechanical arm that has to move taking 2 to 20 msec. By the way the price of the PCIe card or the HDD had nothing to do with with the speed. This basic problem was the ~10 year old PC with PCIe 2.0
In my case there would be M.2 drive expansion card and a sound card in the other. 16x slot for RTX 4070 GPU. All of the usable slots are filled, MATX board. hase 2 M.2s on the board and 1 in PCIe slot, Creative RX 7.1 Souns Card and the RTX 4070 MSI 3 fan Ventus in the 16x slot. Case is a Fractal Pop Air Mini, CPU I5-13500, and Memory Corsair LPX 32GB 3200 kits. 1 PCIe 1x slot is covered by the GPU.
Maybe I missed that in the video but it's worth to mention that a PCIe x1 card can work in any PCIe slot, no matter how many lanes that slot has. The other lanes will then just go unused, as the card will still only use one of the lanes the slot offers. The whole idea of PCIe is that a motherboard has N data lanes, each capable of transferring data at a certain speed, yet if there is an expansion card that requires more speed than a single lane can offer, it can combine multiple physical lanes to a single virtual lane and thus increase the amount of data it can transfer a second by transferring that data in parallel via multiple lanes. In theory any card can work an any slot. A PCIe x1 card can work in a PCIe x16 slot (15 lanes will then go unused) and a PCIe x16 card can work in a PCIe x1 slot but then it only has one lane available and will only operate at 1/16th of the speed it usually operates at and has been designed for. Since cards do not require more lanes for no reason, a PCIe x16 card will often only fit into a x16 slot, which is an artificial limitation solely enforced by the slot design of the motherboard manufacturer. Some mother boards have PCIe x1 slots that are open at the end, in which case a PCIe x16 card will fit into them. A PCIe x1 card on the other hand will always physically fit into a PCIe x16 slot. x1 and x16 are only the extremes, there's also x4 and x8 but those are rare, since most cards either require less bandwidth than even x1 can offer or they require as much bandwidth as the system can offer in total and that's always x16. The rules are: A card with a lower x-number will always fit into a slot of higher x-number and operate normally in that slot. A card with a higher x-number might fit into a slot with a lower x-number, but that depends on the motherboard and if the card will operate correctly depends on how well it can operate when it doesn't receive the full bandwidth it has been designed for. The PCIe standard requires that a PCIe x16 card to work with just one lane, it must not refuse operation, but it does not require that card to offer the same feature set or operate in a meaningful way. E.g. a graphics adapter may operate in a x1 slot but due to the limited bandwidth, refuse to offer certain features that simply would not make any sense given the available bandwidth, up to the point where the card is pretty much useless for any purpose.
My motherboard is full ATX sized, but I only have a total of single x16 slot and two x1 slots, which is limited. I have a GPU and a WiFi card, and only one x1 slot remained. I didn't thought through the choice well enough when I ordered my PC years ago. 🙄
They need to move the x1 slots and still allow plugin access relatively soon as with video cards getting so bloody gigantic w/o being water/liqiud cooled it is impossible to use them on _most_ boards unless you are lucky enough to have one right at the bottom. It's completely ridiculous that architectures have improved so little they need to pull 250+ watts, by themselves, and take up 2.5 slots *MINIMUM* in the midrange, with most being closer to 3 than 2. I could really, really use some additional USB ports. I don't need type C or even 3.0 as I could just move my keyboard, printer and mouse to some 1.0 or 2.0 ports freeing up 3 much faster ports on my board, but I'd have to vertically mount my GPU, or, lol, thio card (I can just picture how ridiculous that would look, along with how inconvenient it would be to plug in things to it after it was installed. Good FuN!. Anyway, board manufacturers need to assume that the first PCIex16 slot is going to have a 2.5 space card in it from now on imo. With the majority of PC owners playing PC games, and the majority of them using midrange GPU's, well the 3060 and 6700XT aren't exactly skinny cards. Even the 2060 and RX 5700 can be pretty damn beefy, so it's time for Motherboard manufacturers to step up and make PICe x1 and x4 useful again! I don't think I can even use the x4 slot on the mATX board I have, and it is really, really close to a full size ATX. Maybe .75 inches smaller in width and 1 inch shorter in length. Unfortunately my 5700 non XT still takes up just over 2.75 lots, making the squeeze into the second x4 slot impossible, and the 2 x1 completely covered. Edit: Btw, I'm going to sub. I've been a PC tech on and off for 22 years, the last 10 years being full-time and a PC fiddler since I was 7 or 8?? Sounds about right. The basics are, idk, relaxing on occasion, and I like the presentation and explanations. It would be great for both you and your channel if you could manage a video per week on the same day around the same time. The alsorithm seems to be a big fan of that kind of thing. You may just be too busy irl, so it's just a thought in the case that you were interested in making some extra money on the side. Wtv the case, very well done video and best of luck in the future!
graphics cards have been over 9 inches for awhile, some are 10 and 11 when you factor in the higher tier cards, but i hear what your saying. i just highly doubt motherboard manufacturers will change much, but it's not really the boards fault it's the separate teams that work in the graphics department. they have been factory overclocking cards since 2009, with MSI being the first. eventually other manufacturers started doing there own version, on top of it UA-cam didn't help any either, because they all started catering to all these tech channels that wanted RGB lighting and different effects, which often times drives the price up. the problem now is people are wanting to moving away from aftermarket cards, but getting the founders edition especially in the last two years has been difficult. back in the day graphics cards weren't really that big, my first PC in 99 at age 16 had a graphics card that's about the same size as a low profile version you can find today like the GTX 1650 low profile version and the newest which is the RX 6400 from Radeon. graphics cards didn't start increasing in size until around 2008, but they were only a little bigger. still older PC cases like my 04 case had trouble trying to fix a Radeon HD 5850, so i had to buy a new case. and the motherboard i had trouble running the card, so i had to upgrade alot, such is the case with pc. i love pc, but there are things about PC i don't like.
Some boards actually do have an x1 slot in the top position, with the x16 slot below it. I think this is possibly the best layout. Also, don’t forget that you can use devices in a larger slot - probably one reason why there aren’t many dedicated x4 and x8 slots.
You can sometimes fit a stubby riser pcie x1 lead in a slot blanked by the graphics card and use an end position slot on the case for the riser’s terminal device. Unless you have a full size atx motherboard there will be unused case slots.
@@Agent-ie3uv I don't use watercooling on my home PC's. I have a 3080 in the same case, with a different board now, and still have the same issue. The last x1 slot would be usable now though...if my power supply was not on the bottom of the case. I suppose I could torch it off then put the PSU on the opposite side of the case which would actually let me use both x1 slots, though they would need to be exceedingly thin. So 1 NVMe card or a network card and...lol idk, an old sound card? As for bulky cards, there really aren't all that many options. Reference 3080s aren't exactly huge by any stretch of the imagination.
PCIe, or serial PCI, was designed such that an X1 or single lane carried as much bandwidth as the old PCI (parallel) slots they were to replace. Bonus fun fact: PCIe was and is completely hardware incompatible with PCI (parallel). However, software wise, the card management system (plug and play) was carried over, which is one reason PCIe took off so quickly. Although you could not use your old PCI cards as PCIe card slots, to the operating system/bios, they both look the same.
@@joseislanio8910 The speed advantage comes from that PCIe is full duplex and each device has a dedicated lane(in the case of 1x). So data can be exchanged in both directions at one. the old PCI only works in half duplex and as all devices are on the same bus they also share all the bandwith.
Its still possible by using a PCI to PCIe bridge. I currently have several PCI cards connected to a PCIe slot via a PCIe to PCI riser and then to a PCI expansion chassis which contains 8 PCI cards for audio production.
#11 In 2014 I was mining crypto as a hobby. My dad had several $50 old refurb Dell computers with no x16 slots. I bought 750 & 750ti cards, at the time they were very competitive for only $100 each, and they only draw 35 watts so they can be powered from the PCIe x1 slot with no cables from the power supply. The mining performance of the cards was only 5% to 10% slower than on a pcie x16 slot. I just needed a x16 to x1 adaptor cable. Also the cards had to go outside the case since there wasn't enough room. For this reason, the 750ti was the best video card ever made, and I don't think anything like that will ever happen again.
You missed a big one. NVMe storage devices. Use a cheap $10 adapter with new laptop SSD like the Toshiba Kioxia BG4 or the Western Digital 530 or 730. Very cheap ($40 512gb) and will make an old computer much faster. Use a boot drive with Clover bootloader to add UEFI NVMe boot drivers to old computers like i5 4670 or 2500k.
Oh...and all this time I've been plugging things in willy-nilly like. 😉 I remember using them for sound cards and even for the TV tuner -- back in the day, that was so cool! We could record direct to computer! I can't wait until technology catches up to the 1980s!
Looking at one of the x16s you can see it really only has pins for x8. Also you may get one that has all the pins and is still an x8. Just look a the specs for your board to be sure of what you got. Also some motherboards disable some functionality when a combination of things is used. Sometimes that can be an M.2 slot disabled when all of the SATA ports have a drive connected. Or sometimes when you have a second video card depending on your motherboard it may turn the x16 into an x8. I don't know how much if any difference that makes to you since some people say you really only need 8 PCIe lanes. I do not know how good or bad their logic is.
Considering using that splitter with nvme adapters that are 1x. I figure unless you are using all the drives at once, it shouldn't be much less performant than using a pice nvme adapter for a single one. I want to do this with a older PC to add multiple drives at a faster speed than sata
Hello! I'm in hardware busniess since edo ram memories are used in computers. As a hoby i start even earlier from the time OricNova64 (Yugoslavian computer) then as everybody these days, Commodore, Atarti, Amiga500 and when i get my first Pc.. Pc286 .. what day.. i will remmeber till i die.. Ok sorry for all of these what i write.. I just want to point that I never had a chanche to see better video than this one.. Everything is more than a perfect. .All facts are true 100% and this guy descibing alll of this more than a perfect.. Well done guys.. keep with good content .. bravo
That ASUS board in the middle at 0:50 I never knew there was such a thing as a board with AGP and PCI Express. I bet that's some OEM board since it has a footprint for a PCIe x16 connector but only has an x1 connector installed.
also the standard ATX has only agp AND pci, the micro atx has agp and only one pcie slot and it is x1(but it has solder points for an x8 or x16), and the mini itx only has one pci slot
What are they used for? In my case nothing, because the designer of my motherboard put the one and only PCIe x1 slot right next to the PCIe x16 slot, where it gets covered by the heatsink on my graphics card. In fact, I've noticed that this is VERY common. The designers have to know that the most common use for a x16 slot is a graphics card. And since most graphics cards today take up the space of two slots, any slot that you put on that side of the x16 slot is going to be useless. Why don't they put the other slots ABOVE it, so they'd be on the side facing the BOTTOM of the graphics card?
Many motherboards have that actually. just looking at my Z490E, it has a PCIEx1 above the main 16X slot. But you can plug PCIEx1 cards in bigger slots lower down on the motherboard, it's not a problem.
@@ledoynier3694 Mine is an old motherboard, it doesn't have any other PCIe slots. Just the x16 slot that my graphics card is in, and the x1 slot next to it that's covered up by the graphics card's heatsink. The only other slots are just plain PCI.
Because a review of the MB will say “since the x16 slot is physically further from the CPU, it will be slightly slower” and gamers won’t buy it. Would it be enough to cost you even a single FPS? No. Will it still destroy sales? Yes.
They probably don't put that above the 16x slot because the lanes of the 16x slot is in the way going to the CPU while the lanes of the 1x has to go down to the chipset. More layers on the PCB would solve this, but also make the motherboard more expensive. You might see this on more expensive motherboards that have many PCB layers.
Me looking at my sound card: yeah, seems about right. Also nice GA-P67A-UD3 there, I have it's younger nephew a GA-Z77-D3H here, same slot configuration. In fact, the GA-P67A-UD3 is even used on Wikipedia for the PCI-Express article. But the real question is about the intermediate x4 and x8 slots, there aren't many consumer cards for those.
I might get a TV tuner card. My last TV crapped out about 7 years ago and I just never bothered to buy another one, because I rarely watched it. All I really want it for is local news and the local weather and of course for when my internet goes down, which it does quite regularly out here in the country!
04:51 is a mistake Let's say the base line is PCIe Gen 3 X1 that means 7.8 Gigabit per second. The picture on the left is 2.5 Gigabit LAN card as for the 10 Gigabit LAN Card, in theory it only needs PCIe Gen 3 X2 lanes, but it doesn't exist physically, so it needs PCIe X4 with X2 lanes are actually Blank. 05:23 The PCIe Gen 3 X1 Lane actually fast enough to capture 1440p which is slightly above FHD 1080p Because 7.8 Gigabit speed on the X1 slot is more than enough for video capture at 1440p
Great video , i am going to plug in an expansion card so that i can run 4 monitors from my pc , its not cheap but i need 3 monitors now and the build i am about to do has only 1 and i hate wasting pcie lanes
@@danielbarnes3406 I got a SoundBlaster Se card from Amazon...total shite the sound quality was awful(through a £1k Yamaha separates system) and loads of hiss/interference..... sent it right back.
Surely the easy answer is that if it was fine in a regular PCI slot then a PCIe x1 will be adequate? Also, while I think it's understood, you don't emphasize the 'e' (the Express much so it sounds like you said 'PCI' with a trailing sound that's hard to make it. I think it's also useful to understand that a PCIe lane is actualy an independent serial data stream as compared to old schools PCI devices use of parallel data transfer where you need the data from each line to reconstruct the transmitted data. Serial communications scale much better in terms
If you want to install a sensorpanel and you use a panel with a hdmi connection , can you use a "hdmi to mini pci-e cable" to connect to your lcd ? Just to avoid you have to use the hdmi port on your grafics card and go out your case with the cable ...
I have a wifi card in my PCIex1 connecter. Thank goodness, a power surge blew out my onboard ethernet. No LEDs on back of mobo and ethernet adapter no longer shows up in the device manager. Dont have the money for a new mobo, so I am very happy my prebuilt came with a wifi card.
That blue board with the 3 X1 slots and 2 'X16' slots looks to be 1 X16 and one X8 slot (look at the number of receptor pins in the lowest slot (left one))
kind of with the part of x x2 x4 x8 and x16 being the only sizes. You also have x32 but the only places i see them is on custom motherboards and server motherboards. The reason for them has been to be support a breakout board of x16 or a combination of x16 and others maybe even 4 x16 slots running at a lower gen of pcie speed. So not a thing most consumers will use as using 4 x16 cards isn't a thing most consumers do anymore.
Good video. I have one question though. If there are 2 ports in a PCIe SATA expansion card running in a PCIe 2.0 x1 slot .. does each SATA port get only half the bandwidth i.e. 500 MB/s divided by 2, or can one port still run at 500 MB/s if the other port is not being used? A bit confused on this issue, thanks.
ive never seen that pcie splitter card. i would love a link to that or a 4x version, and maybe an enclosure that the cards could go into. ive been looking for something like this for a while now
The biggest drawback of most PCIe x1 slots is that you can only fit x1 cards in them. Only a few high end boards have open end x1 slots which allow you to plug even x16 cards in them.
Ive cut the ends open on a old board once for dual gpu use (onlt had a 1x and 16x the rest were PCI) did work liek a charm but not all slots are equal and most are flemsy and will break. My current board is budget oriented but does indeed have open ended pci 1x slots.
@@BrunodeSouzaLino yup mine is like this. the m.2 slot *e keyed* for wifi/bluetooth is infront of one so the only way to use it is to remove the module.
@@HappyBeezerStudios I no longer have it, I have a different motherboard with Realtek ALC1220. I still have a PCI Xonar DG though in my Dual Xeon Workstation.
@@HappyBeezerStudiosDriver support always seems to be the main crux of the sound cards that I have. The other one is boards that don't have ISA or PCI slots. Over the years I have had and replaced a lot of sound cards. Sound Blaster Vibra 16, AWE 64 GOLD, Yamaha DS-XG, PCI 128, PCI 512, Live! 5.1, Audigy 2, Audigy 4, Recon 3D, Xonar DG, DGX, SE. There were probably a few other ones. The Xonar SE stopped working though. Most of these cards I got cheap or free. Most of them I parted after not having a machine to use them in or them being compatible with Windows 10.
No yelling,goofy faces or loud annoying music or effects. Excellent
someone doesnt like linus
Most Filipino vloggers always does this and its freakin annoying tbh. E.g. Unbox Diaries
@@pinroshan020he sounds East Indian to me.
he added a sound effect for slide transitions and voice enumerations
Or rampant sexual harrassment.
Other things I have put into PCIe x1 slot:
- M.2 drive in a vertical slot. It limits bandwidth, but it's fine for light use. As a bonus, if you use 2230 size drive it fits in 1U rack case and most ITX-sized or thin client sized cases.
- Serial and parallel port adapters. They are still used widely for industrial applications, and in engineering
- Firewire card. It was used for debugging Windows kernel drivers. You can use USB 3.0 for this, now.
- TV Tuner / capture card. To my surprise they are still manufactured.
- Oscilloscope interface card - that's clearly very industrial use case, along with other signal analysers
- M.2 carrier board with x1 to x4 lane for one nvme drive, and two other AHCI M.2 drives, located on the other side of PCB, with SATA connectors on the edge to connect to motherboard
- 2.5" HDD carrier, which required only SATA connector to the board, and pulled power from PCIe slot. Very clean solution.
- two-drive 2.5" HDD carrier, which had on-board SATA controller, therefore requireing no cables at all
- SAS Expander. It's basically port multiplier for SAS - has input and output ports, it takes power from PCIe and presents small device for monitoring and management to host system. Btw SATA can also be multiplied, one SATA port can address 5 disks.
- 16-camera analog monitoring system, with 16 BNC and RS-485 connectors for grabbing and controlling PTZ on remote cameras. And, yes, x1 port PCIe 2.0. 500 MB/s is excessively enough for 16 VGA streams, especially already encoded to MPEG-2.
- 4G LTE card. Kind of same as with WiFi (also requires separate USB cable), but also has SIM card slot. Technically you can use any WiFi carrier card, and and interposer with a SIM slot.
- A fan. Literally a GPU-sized PCB with two slim fans cleverly mounted on it, blowing upwards through PCB into card above it or CPU area, took power from PCIe slot.
- card reader. Technically it was front panel-mounted, but there was teeny-tiny x1 PCIe "card" with microscopic USB controller on it, and ribbon cable leading to the front panel bay, which housed actual card slots. It had literally everything, from Sony's MagicStick, RS-MMC, SDXC and microSDXC, CF I/II (including Microdrive!), CFast, XD, and more, and had decent speeds.
- AGEIA PhysX card. Dell has PCIe version of it.
I will always scoff at motherboard manufacturers that leave empty places where x1 slots could be, and not leaving their backs open, so x4 or longer card could be inserted.
Just cut the plastic end of the x1 slot and you can fit a 4x card. Done it in 2 boards without a problem for a Soundblaster and LSI SAS raid card.
i use a combo pata and sata card for connecting additional drives. the pata is for my friidump dvd drive
Serial ports are massively used in some industries like railways, factories, science laboratories and R&D. We use them at work all the time - one PC has 8 serial ports available (4 PCIe X1 cards all in a row), it was cheaper than Moxa and USB adapters are often less reliable
Ya don't use this for NVMe storage. Even a low end modern NVMe drive is gonna get kneecapped to about half it's speed like that.
@@SC-hk6ui yes that's what speed means
You know when you hear that accent, you're about to get educated. No BS, no cringe and obnoxious filler, and no jump cuts ever 2 seconds. Thank you so much for this. 💖
I learned more in a few minutes than i would have looking all of this up myself. Thank you for saving me so much time and frustration. Very well taught, spoken, and described!!! 🙌👏👏
I've been building PC's for a long time and I still learned a lot from this presentation. Excellent job.
You can also plug an x1 x2 x4 or x8 card into an x16 slot. I have an x1 wifi card plugged into the x16 slot on my mini itx board.
I wish they added an xtra x2 or x1 😢
Great and informative video. I just wanted to add just a few bits of additional information. In a SLI/Crossfire motherboard, The top PCI-E 16x slot closest to the CPU has 16 lanes, the other blue 16x slot further below (farther away from the CPU) is a 16x PCI-E slot with only 8 lanes. You can visually see this, where you can see the pins stops in the middle and the rest of the slot is just plastic. Those 8 lanes from that slot connects directly to the last 8 lanes of the top PCI-E 16x slot. So if you plug anything into this slot, even a 1x PCI-E device, than the top 16x slot will be downgraded from 16 lanes to 8 lanes in the BIOS, since they can't both use those lanes at the same time. So If you have a high end GPU in the top 16x slot, I highly recommend you don't plug anything into the other 16x slot below unless you absolutely have to. In this video, the bottom 16x slot is just a 4x PCI-E that connects to the chipset, so it won't downgrade the 16x to 8x.
Yeah, youre right, but some gen3 slot with 8 lines and fastest single gpu will work maybe 98% speed if card is put to 16x (100%) speed. I'am right? I don't have number's but gen3 x8 is faster than. Gen1 x16 I think.
But how wide is your way, dosen't tell everything.
And in RAM sticks, ddr3 vs ddr4 there's much misleading. Ram speed in Hz rise, so do 'latency' in stick's, so ram itself could even slow some weird cases when 'upgrade' stuff.
I have old ddr3 16gbytes x6 and some ddr2 were faster at test's and ddr4 didn't be much better, it's confusing sometimes.
But now we talking about pci-e's.
At least today's many computer have just graphics, other stuff is integrated.
Some ISA slot's era, nothing was integrated. Not even printer port or hard drive controllers.
If you want some floppy drive to your computer, it need to connect a some sort of card.
Soundcard's were just starting to shape back then..
This board in video still having normal pci's, those are gone today.
Yeah a lot of people out there not realising their device is maybe only working at half speed. That or can't work out why their USB3.1 ports stopped working.
so thats why my gpu running 8 lanes,i have a wifi card installed
Well damn, I didn't know this, that's kinda dumb but thanks for sharing. I'm glad I haven't put anything in that slot, especially as it's an older PCIe 3.0 motherboard with an RTX 4070! I'd lose a ton of performance if it went down to 8 lanes. Definitely something worth remembering.
It depends on the board.
There are some where the "primary" slot has 16 lanes but will be split in multi GPU,
there are some where the primary runs from the CPU and the other slot from the chipset (so no splitting, the primary card stays in x16, but the other can run in whatever the board offers)
Performance difference between x16 and x8 is generally no concern. There is a drop, but that is so small, that it is hardly noticeable between the microstutter and other bottlenecks.
Although not having learned anything new, I think this video is a perfect starting point for further research
Great video for an intro to this slot. Although rare, there are also graphics cards available in x1. I have an Nvidia NVS-300 which has dual DVI output using only an x1 slot. This is useful in PCs where your want another 'low use' monitor to be used for your desktop, but to not take graphics RAM from your primary card.
can dremel out the end and populate it with 16x videocards fine:) have done it a few times in systems where gpu is low priority....
the most recent gt 710 with 4 hdmi outputs also comes in x1 form factor
I have just such an application in use. I resurrected an old eMachine to run some older software under XP (won't run right on a 64-bit platform) and have a 1x NVS-300 in it. It works remarkably well driving two monitors (I'm using the DVI to dual-vga setup). Though I'm under no illusions that this would be a game platform even in its day, lol.
@@tobiwonkanogy2975 They have ASUS GT 730 also with 4 HDMI outputs in PCIE x 1 format.
You don't need the card to fit the x1 slot, you can just use any card with an adaptor cable.
Thank you so much for this video, ngl, i had no idea what that slot was even for and I was hunting everywhere for a video like this one, very detailed and you made it very easy to understand for a new pc user (like me) to catch on quickly, thank you 😊
Never had much tech savvy so I learnt a ton from this simple and easy to grasp explanation. Great video, now I understand a motherboard better. Thanks and God bless
Excellent video, straight to the point without all the bells and whistles and constant requests to subscribe, wish they were all made like this. I'm going to be putting a new PC together soon so have subscribed keep up the good work
Clear tutorial. Easy explanations. Good visuals. I came here to learn if I can use a PCIe X1 to connect more HDDs and if the pcie lane can allow the speeds to read them at the same time. Although I didn't find an answer to my question, I watched the whole video. Nicely made!
Thank you for explaining clearly why I don't need extra PCIe slots. Makes my life so much easier.
Thank you so much, i have been looking at what upgrades I can do to my PC and you have given me clarity on the subject. I will be adding a Capture card and USB ports for my devices!
Very good coverage. Thank you. I needed a refresher course on this topic. Excellent work. Subbed.
Very insightful and explanation made it easy to understand. Thank you
You did not cover all cases here. Total amount of available number of PCIe lanes and the source of the PCIe capabilities - some of it is chipset based and some of it CPU based. Integrated devices get some lanes to themselves as well. Also, not only PCIe splitting, but the PCIe switching is a thing as well.
I could be wrong, but I believe your topics are beyond the scope of this specific video.
@@CajunReaper95 I didn’t think I was wrong. I mean, the video was specifically about the use cases for a x1 slot. Availability of more PCIe lanes, where they come from, how they’re possibly switched, or anything else is pretty irrelevant to how you can potentially use just one lane.
Although, he did touch on splitting a little with one of the x1 adapters that he showed. The one that had 4 more x1 slots, and he said that you won’t get any more bandwidth than the initial x1 available to the card.
you going to sue? this video was for square brains or beginner pc builders.
not for you to crap all over them
he is trying to make it good
@@CajunReaper95 I may be wrong, but I dont think you were wrong about StolenJoker84 being wrong either
Thank you! Well explained... I never knew what PCIe 1x slots were good for. Very good
Wow! Thankx, after decades wondering what use that port might have, i finaly got the answare!
Thank you for explaining this very well, I was having a hard time understanding every other video that I tried finding on this topic
Awesome intro for understanding the use cases for PCIe slots! Thanks!
The most interesting thing I learned is that you can plug an x1 card into an x16 slot, if you have trouble finding room among your other cards.
You can do worse than that. The PCIe bus is backwards compatible, latency and delay tolerant to strange degrees. When some hacking teams were starting to hack into the PS4, one of the people had the idea of using the PCIe bus as a serial connection and that worked. In his words, it was essentially PCIe x0.0000001.
fair warning, plugging x1 cards into certain x16's can cause your gpu's slot to drop into x8 mode. this will vary by motherboard.
My PC might be a bit on the older side, but it had 2 PCI slots, a PCIe x16 slot, an x16 sized x8 slot, an x16 sized x4 slot, and 2 x1 slots.
I have the graphics card in the x16 slot (Obviously), a TV Tuner/Video capture card in the 1st x1 slot, a WiFi card in the 2nd 1x slot, and an NVMe SSD in the x4 slot.
Other devices I've had plugged into the computer, but not currently attached include a SATA card, USB 3 card and a Parallel/Serial port card.
You just explained a reason to have a full size case and ATX motherboard which allows all those slots. I have one. You can't go wrong with a lot of slots and SATA ports and USB 2 & 3 ports. Reminds me of when the Apple II had eight card slots, as well as the Imsai and Altair computers. You had to use a card and slot to add just about anything like sound cards, etc.
@@vancejochim8537 I do like full size cases.
Though if I was building a PC today, the cards would probably be different.
I doubt I'd need the PCIe M.2 card, because modern motherboards tend to have at least 1 onboard, but I might need a SATA card instead. I'd probably also not need a WiFi card either, as that would most likely also be onboard, or in one of those micro PCIe slots on the motherboard.
Solid. Excellent, clear explanation. Thank you for taking the time to create and share this.
Wonderfully clear and exhaustive. Such technically clean presentations are rare in UA-cam. I am buying a new Workstation with other PCI slots and I needed this info sorely. Thanks a lot.
No worries about the old school board. My 2014 rig is still running PCIE 2.0 but will read contemporary SSD NVM adapters and therefore I am currently using SSDs with and AM3+ MOBO.
EDIT: meaning PCIe is, in fact, backwards AND forward compatible, with regards to power & data transfer as I researched prior to getting those NVM adapter cards... The amount of power and data transfer will of course be dictated by the specs/generation of your MOBO and data lane capabilities, etc.
"PCIe is, in fact, backwards AND forward compatible"
not really. For instance MB GB Aorus Elite DDR4 won't recognise neither AMD FirePro V5800 nor Radon HD6450 till Windows starts so you won't be able to see the MB BIOS interface with neither one of those cards. This is not what we expect from a "backward compatibility" definition. This happens on many recent motherboards regardless of what PCI-E settings such as PCI-E version are selected in the BIOS. All the standards are just recommendations so it's all up to the HW manufacturers whether to follow them or not.
@Jei Cynth i tried an NVMe Expansion Adapter card for M.2 NVMe of 1TB a WD/Black, motherboard an Asus Prime Z-390-A NoN 4x Pcie capable i connected the M.2 NVMe 1TB Drive and was rather disappointed it Ran Slower then the current Hard Drive 7200 RPM wasn't understanding why even tried the other Appropriate slots for the PCIe Adapter card but the No Avail... so i gave up i don't know if i had to go into Bios to arrange setting in there🤷♂ think i did but either not help. If you have any info or Advice as to why i was not receiving better Speeds i'd Greatly a Appreciated👍🏻 P.S. Hope i made sense as to what i was Referring to...
@@ThisOLmaan hmmm only thing off top of my head is what are you CPU & RAM specs? My 2014 rig has 32Gigs Ram and 4.00 nom ghz processor I believe... Something Vishera, I'll have to lookup that newegg order.
@@NeinFeline : i have the Asus Prime Z390-A motherboard, i5-9600k, 32 Gb Ram, the motherboard supports 2 M.2 NVMe's but wanted to add another in one of the PCIe slots, and like i mentioned the speed where slower then a Hard Drive, even though my motherboard does not support Gen 4.0 i was still getting pretty fast Transfer Rates in there respective m.2 slots.
just to add my 2 cents to this discussion.
PCIe backward compatability can be seen from 2 side's. From the card and from the motherboard. Motheboards(actualy the processor and/or chipset) generaly support all all older PCIe versions. So an old add-in card will still link up and work.
The other way arround cannot be said. Newer card's don't always work in older boards. I have read somewhere that from a certain generation nvidia cards PCIe 2.1 is the minimum they require and AMD cards will still work all very ancient PCIe 1.0 boards.
Why PCIe 2.1? That is when a change was made to the PCIe on the wire signaling.
For why and old graphics card does not show an image when powering on the machine. That is rather simple. Those cards boot rom's don't contain an UEFI drive and only have 16-bit BIOS code. To allow old cards to work UEFI uses CSM to allow it to interface with that old 16-bit BIOS. So if CSM is turned off... no display until an graphics driver initialises the card.
There are also X1 cards for dial-up modems, some that are mpcie adapter cards for like cellular modems, and there are I/o cards such as serial and parallel ports.
The HTC Vive VR headset has a wireless adapter that utilizes a 1x card that the receiver Connects to carry the video and USB signals
Interesting but not many would bother, and it'd be plenty easy and cheap to just to use a regular PCI dial up modem and no disadvantage in terms of performance, many modern boards in recent times still include a regular PCI slot for legacy. And not many would have a serial/parallel port (maybe you'd have a ancient printer/scanner you'd want to still use or something)
But even if its true many would probably just use a cellular router then connect with a regular wifi card to that.
Then again they probably only bother with that if the motherboard doesn't already have a header for serial/parallel ports (some would for the legacy option) And of course there's the option to run a old machine that has them natively for just as cheap if not cheaper.
@@patg108 except boards now do not come with PCI slots. PCIe or USB or go home is the approach now. Has been for a few years.
Frankly you're an idiot if you're rocking an infernal modem for anything beyond a fax machine anyway!! v90 serial was the beast .. even flex was ok.
@@NullaNulla i'm certain you're mistaken about PCI, there probably is the oddball modern motherboard that includes a regular old PCI slot or 2. I'm well aware its in decline but last i saw a few months ago i could find a board or 2 with one.
And I agree but dial up has a few more uses, Mainly for oddball legacy things like connecting a dreamcast to play online or similar consoles or just for novelties.
And i was saying why waste the PCI-E slot instead of the PCI with that?
And i wouldn't rock a dial up modem be it v90 or v92 or whatever. It'd only be in use for a very niche case scenario and nothing else.
@@patg108 "And i was saying why waste the PCI-E slot instead of the PCI with that?"
I do agree with there if there is a PCI slot on the board.
I don't doubt there is oddballs around still with PCI but they're far from the norm now. I grew up with 16bit ISA and have experience back to the Commodore VIC20, what I see now is so far ahead with USB actually being reliable now, USB storage media being reliable and so on, I could have never dreamed of this all them years ago. I could foresee some things like better laptops and laptops becoming more the norm for folks but my Note10+ with it's stylus (even just the linux based computer as a phone) never even crossed my mind.
So imagine my surprise when PCI, parallel and serial started disappearing.
Another consideration is the power available from the PCIe bus to the inserted card and how this differs between PCIe generations.
Chris.Brisson
What is your consideration, 1x on gen 2, max 10 watt still, what is it you need on 1x ? V volt still ?
very informative! thank you, great content
Very good explanation. Many thanks.
Interesting note, the motherboard you use to display the PCI-E slots, the second PCI-E x16 slot is only wired for X8.
LAVA Computer (Canada) Dual Serial PCIe cards.
Works very well. Long-term company (40+ years).
No hardware or software issues after 10+ years using their PCIe card.
Around 2017 I bought a SSD, but my 2008 HP dc5850 only supported SATA-2 running at 300MB/s. So I bought a $8 Chinese SATA-3 PCIe x1 card. Unfortunately the system only supported PCIe 2.0, so I only achieved ~400MB/s for the SSD (530MB/s). To be honest the Chinese card complained about PCIe 2.0 during the boot process, but I was happy with a 33% throughput improvement for $8.00.
cheap is slow
@@lucasrem Still much faster than a HDD. besides the main advantage of the SSD is not the throughput, but the fact that it has no mechanical arm that has to move taking 2 to 20 msec.
By the way the price of the PCIe card or the HDD had nothing to do with with the speed. This basic problem was the ~10 year old PC with PCIe 2.0
In my case there would be M.2 drive expansion card and a sound card in the other. 16x slot for RTX 4070 GPU. All of the usable slots are filled, MATX board. hase 2 M.2s on the board and 1 in PCIe slot, Creative RX 7.1 Souns Card and the RTX 4070 MSI 3 fan Ventus in the 16x slot. Case is a Fractal Pop Air Mini, CPU I5-13500, and Memory Corsair LPX 32GB 3200 kits. 1 PCIe 1x slot is covered by the GPU.
Thank you very much for making /posting this informative video, I watched it a couple times!
Maybe I missed that in the video but it's worth to mention that a PCIe x1 card can work in any PCIe slot, no matter how many lanes that slot has. The other lanes will then just go unused, as the card will still only use one of the lanes the slot offers.
The whole idea of PCIe is that a motherboard has N data lanes, each capable of transferring data at a certain speed, yet if there is an expansion card that requires more speed than a single lane can offer, it can combine multiple physical lanes to a single virtual lane and thus increase the amount of data it can transfer a second by transferring that data in parallel via multiple lanes. In theory any card can work an any slot. A PCIe x1 card can work in a PCIe x16 slot (15 lanes will then go unused) and a PCIe x16 card can work in a PCIe x1 slot but then it only has one lane available and will only operate at 1/16th of the speed it usually operates at and has been designed for.
Since cards do not require more lanes for no reason, a PCIe x16 card will often only fit into a x16 slot, which is an artificial limitation solely enforced by the slot design of the motherboard manufacturer. Some mother boards have PCIe x1 slots that are open at the end, in which case a PCIe x16 card will fit into them. A PCIe x1 card on the other hand will always physically fit into a PCIe x16 slot. x1 and x16 are only the extremes, there's also x4 and x8 but those are rare, since most cards either require less bandwidth than even x1 can offer or they require as much bandwidth as the system can offer in total and that's always x16.
The rules are: A card with a lower x-number will always fit into a slot of higher x-number and operate normally in that slot. A card with a higher x-number might fit into a slot with a lower x-number, but that depends on the motherboard and if the card will operate correctly depends on how well it can operate when it doesn't receive the full bandwidth it has been designed for. The PCIe standard requires that a PCIe x16 card to work with just one lane, it must not refuse operation, but it does not require that card to offer the same feature set or operate in a meaningful way. E.g. a graphics adapter may operate in a x1 slot but due to the limited bandwidth, refuse to offer certain features that simply would not make any sense given the available bandwidth, up to the point where the card is pretty much useless for any purpose.
Thanks for the video. It was really helpful as now I know which cards to be used in which slots.👍
I leant some useful things from this video, so I liked and subscribed!
Educational and no nonsense, this is a great video
My motherboard is full ATX sized, but I only have a total of single x16 slot and two x1 slots, which is limited. I have a GPU and a WiFi card, and only one x1 slot remained. I didn't thought through the choice well enough when I ordered my PC years ago. 🙄
Well explained. Thanks.
Excellent video. These old PCI slots will confuse modern folks.
In fact, even the latest WiFi network cards that support WiFi 6E (802.11ax Extended) still only used a PCIe x1 slot.
depends on the generation. I guess those new wifi cards supports PCIe gen 4 or 5 whereas older Wifi N or AC cards were on gen 2 or 3.
Mislabeled title, ...the description of what PCIe x1 is and what devices use the slot starts at 4:00 nearly half time into the video.
Nicely done, good explanation of everything, feel better now, thank you ✔✔😀😀
They need to move the x1 slots and still allow plugin access relatively soon as with video cards getting so bloody gigantic w/o being water/liqiud cooled it is impossible to use them on _most_ boards unless you are lucky enough to have one right at the bottom. It's completely ridiculous that architectures have improved so little they need to pull 250+ watts, by themselves, and take up 2.5 slots *MINIMUM* in the midrange, with most being closer to 3 than 2. I could really, really use some additional USB ports. I don't need type C or even 3.0 as I could just move my keyboard, printer and mouse to some 1.0 or 2.0 ports freeing up 3 much faster ports on my board, but I'd have to vertically mount my GPU, or, lol, thio card (I can just picture how ridiculous that would look, along with how inconvenient it would be to plug in things to it after it was installed. Good FuN!. Anyway, board manufacturers need to assume that the first PCIex16 slot is going to have a 2.5 space card in it from now on imo. With the majority of PC owners playing PC games, and the majority of them using midrange GPU's, well the 3060 and 6700XT aren't exactly skinny cards. Even the 2060 and RX 5700 can be pretty damn beefy, so it's time for Motherboard manufacturers to step up and make PICe x1 and x4 useful again! I don't think I can even use the x4 slot on the mATX board I have, and it is really, really close to a full size ATX. Maybe .75 inches smaller in width and 1 inch shorter in length. Unfortunately my 5700 non XT still takes up just over 2.75 lots, making the squeeze into the second x4 slot impossible, and the 2 x1 completely covered.
Edit: Btw, I'm going to sub. I've been a PC tech on and off for 22 years, the last 10 years being full-time and a PC fiddler since I was 7 or 8?? Sounds about right. The basics are, idk, relaxing on occasion, and I like the presentation and explanations. It would be great for both you and your channel if you could manage a video per week on the same day around the same time. The alsorithm seems to be a big fan of that kind of thing. You may just be too busy irl, so it's just a thought in the case that you were interested in making some extra money on the side. Wtv the case, very well done video and best of luck in the future!
graphics cards have been over 9 inches for awhile, some are 10 and 11 when you factor in the higher tier cards, but i hear what your saying. i just highly doubt motherboard manufacturers will change much, but it's not really the boards fault it's the separate teams that work in the graphics department. they have been factory overclocking cards since 2009, with MSI being the first. eventually other manufacturers started doing there own version, on top of it UA-cam didn't help any either, because they all started catering to all these tech channels that wanted RGB lighting and different effects, which often times drives the price up. the problem now is people are wanting to moving away from aftermarket cards, but getting the founders edition especially in the last two years has been difficult.
back in the day graphics cards weren't really that big, my first PC in 99 at age 16 had a graphics card that's about the same size as a low profile version you can find today like the GTX 1650 low profile version and the newest which is the RX 6400 from Radeon. graphics cards didn't start increasing in size until around 2008, but they were only a little bigger. still older PC cases like my 04 case had trouble trying to fix a Radeon HD 5850, so i had to buy a new case. and the motherboard i had trouble running the card, so i had to upgrade alot, such is the case with pc. i love pc, but there are things about PC i don't like.
Some boards actually do have an x1 slot in the top position, with the x16 slot below it. I think this is possibly the best layout. Also, don’t forget that you can use devices in a larger slot - probably one reason why there aren’t many dedicated x4 and x8 slots.
You can sometimes fit a stubby riser pcie x1 lead in a slot blanked by the graphics card and use an end position slot on the case for the riser’s terminal device. Unless you have a full size atx motherboard there will be unused case slots.
Its your fault for choosing bulky g. cards and water cooler.
@@Agent-ie3uv I don't use watercooling on my home PC's. I have a 3080 in the same case, with a different board now, and still have the same issue. The last x1 slot would be usable now though...if my power supply was not on the bottom of the case. I suppose I could torch it off then put the PSU on the opposite side of the case which would actually let me use both x1 slots, though they would need to be exceedingly thin. So 1 NVMe card or a network card and...lol idk, an old sound card?
As for bulky cards, there really aren't all that many options. Reference 3080s aren't exactly huge by any stretch of the imagination.
PCIe, or serial PCI, was designed such that an X1 or single lane carried as much bandwidth as the old PCI (parallel) slots they were to replace.
Bonus fun fact: PCIe was and is completely hardware incompatible with PCI (parallel). However, software wise, the card management system (plug and play) was carried over, which is one reason PCIe took off so quickly. Although you could not use your old PCI cards as PCIe card slots, to the operating system/bios, they both look the same.
I thought it was a lot faster than old PCI, even when it's PCIe gen 1 x1
@@joseislanio8910 The speed advantage comes from that PCIe is full duplex and each device has a dedicated lane(in the case of 1x). So data can be exchanged in both directions at one. the old PCI only works in half duplex and as all devices are on the same bus they also share all the bandwith.
Its still possible by using a PCI to PCIe bridge. I currently have several PCI cards connected to a PCIe slot via a PCIe to PCI riser and then to a PCI expansion chassis which contains 8 PCI cards for audio production.
Thank you friend! I would love to hear about what types of weird / interesting cards are available for the PCIe x1 slot :) ☮
You forgot the adapter that allows you to use a nvme ssd on a non nvme motherboard
great informative video they make nvme m.2 adapters like the sata adapter as well for x1 x4 x16 slots to expand additional storage.
galindojamie
NVMe is just PCI lanes, need NVMe Gen 5 speeds ?
#11
In 2014 I was mining crypto as a hobby. My dad had several $50 old refurb Dell computers with no x16 slots. I bought 750 & 750ti cards, at the time they were very competitive for only $100 each, and they only draw 35 watts so they can be powered from the PCIe x1 slot with no cables from the power supply.
The mining performance of the cards was only 5% to 10% slower than on a pcie x16 slot.
I just needed a x16 to x1 adaptor cable. Also the cards had to go outside the case since there wasn't enough room.
For this reason, the 750ti was the best video card ever made, and I don't think anything like that will ever happen again.
In Indonesia that cards was popular, we call it lord cespleng
@@creambat21 Yes, it runs cool and also stays dry like a towel because it's not water-cooled
@@customsongmaker yes I agree, and also has low power consumption
@@creambat21 lel, didnt know that 😂
Long live PCIe x1 slots. I managed to F up my usb3 header on my mobo. thanks to this I can still use my usbs on my front IO.
You missed a big one. NVMe storage devices. Use a cheap $10 adapter with new laptop SSD like the Toshiba Kioxia BG4 or the Western Digital 530 or 730. Very cheap ($40 512gb) and will make an old computer much faster. Use a boot drive with Clover bootloader to add UEFI NVMe boot drivers to old computers like i5 4670 or 2500k.
NVMe would be overkill for the slow speed of these ports.
@@TomFoolery9001 well, you could always migrate it to a new build when upgrading.
What a dumb idea
Oh...and all this time I've been plugging things in willy-nilly like. 😉 I remember using them for sound cards and even for the TV tuner -- back in the day, that was so cool! We could record direct to computer! I can't wait until technology catches up to the 1980s!
love from india ❤ bro e
explanation is too godd gg
Looking at one of the x16s you can see it really only has pins for x8. Also you may get one that has all the pins and is still an x8. Just look a the specs for your board to be sure of what you got. Also some motherboards disable some functionality when a combination of things is used. Sometimes that can be an M.2 slot disabled when all of the SATA ports have a drive connected. Or sometimes when you have a second video card depending on your motherboard it may turn the x16 into an x8. I don't know how much if any difference that makes to you since some people say you really only need 8 PCIe lanes. I do not know how good or bad their logic is.
A very clear explanation, thanks very much.
Considering using that splitter with nvme adapters that are 1x. I figure unless you are using all the drives at once, it shouldn't be much less performant than using a pice nvme adapter for a single one. I want to do this with a older PC to add multiple drives at a faster speed than sata
Hello! I'm in hardware busniess since edo ram memories are used in computers. As a hoby i start even earlier from the time OricNova64 (Yugoslavian computer) then as everybody these days, Commodore, Atarti, Amiga500 and when i get my first Pc.. Pc286 .. what day.. i will remmeber till i die.. Ok sorry for all of these what i write.. I just want to point that I never had a chanche to see better video than this one.. Everything is more than a perfect. .All facts are true 100% and this guy descibing alll of this more than a perfect.. Well done guys.. keep with good content .. bravo
That ASUS board in the middle at 0:50 I never knew there was such a thing as a board with AGP and PCI Express. I bet that's some OEM board since it has a footprint for a PCIe x16 connector but only has an x1 connector installed.
also the standard ATX has only agp AND pci, the micro atx has agp and only one pcie slot and it is x1(but it has solder points for an x8 or x16), and the mini itx only has one pci slot
Well spotted.
What are they used for? In my case nothing, because the designer of my motherboard put the one and only PCIe x1 slot right next to the PCIe x16 slot, where it gets covered by the heatsink on my graphics card.
In fact, I've noticed that this is VERY common. The designers have to know that the most common use for a x16 slot is a graphics card. And since most graphics cards today take up the space of two slots, any slot that you put on that side of the x16 slot is going to be useless.
Why don't they put the other slots ABOVE it, so they'd be on the side facing the BOTTOM of the graphics card?
Many motherboards have that actually. just looking at my Z490E, it has a PCIEx1 above the main 16X slot.
But you can plug PCIEx1 cards in bigger slots lower down on the motherboard, it's not a problem.
@@ledoynier3694 Mine is an old motherboard, it doesn't have any other PCIe slots. Just the x16 slot that my graphics card is in, and the x1 slot next to it that's covered up by the graphics card's heatsink.
The only other slots are just plain PCI.
Because a review of the MB will say “since the x16 slot is physically further from the CPU, it will be slightly slower” and gamers won’t buy it.
Would it be enough to cost you even a single FPS? No. Will it still destroy sales? Yes.
@@piedpiper1172 OK, so move the x1 slots down a space. Or add a second x1 slot.
They probably don't put that above the 16x slot because the lanes of the 16x slot is in the way going to the CPU while the lanes of the 1x has to go down to the chipset. More layers on the PCB would solve this, but also make the motherboard more expensive. You might see this on more expensive motherboards that have many PCB layers.
Now this is an informative video
Nice vid. I learned a lot from it 😊
Me looking at my sound card: yeah, seems about right.
Also nice GA-P67A-UD3 there, I have it's younger nephew a GA-Z77-D3H here, same slot configuration.
In fact, the GA-P67A-UD3 is even used on Wikipedia for the PCI-Express article.
But the real question is about the intermediate x4 and x8 slots, there aren't many consumer cards for those.
I might get a TV tuner card. My last TV crapped out about 7 years ago and I just never bothered to buy another one, because I rarely watched it. All I really want it for is local news and the local weather and of course for when my internet goes down, which it does quite regularly out here in the country!
For just news and weather, just use UA-cam and find channels you want.
04:51 is a mistake
Let's say the base line is PCIe Gen 3 X1 that means 7.8 Gigabit per second. The picture on the left is 2.5 Gigabit LAN card
as for the 10 Gigabit LAN Card, in theory it only needs PCIe Gen 3 X2 lanes, but it doesn't exist physically, so it needs PCIe X4 with X2 lanes are actually Blank.
05:23 The PCIe Gen 3 X1 Lane actually fast enough to capture 1440p which is slightly above FHD 1080p Because 7.8 Gigabit speed on the X1 slot is more than enough for video capture at 1440p
I typically just cut the back of an X1 slot and use any size card in it depending on needs despite bandwidth limitations.
Excellent video and explanation.
Great video , i am going to plug in an expansion card so that i can run 4 monitors from my pc , its not cheap but i need 3 monitors now and the build i am about to do has only 1 and i hate wasting pcie lanes
I put in a wifi and bluetooth card, very nice
The left x16 slot on that Gigabyte board is only pinned for 8x cards by the way 😊
I use 1 for my Audigy RX, 1 for a wifi/bluetooth card. They are very useful. A soundcard does not 8x or 16x lanes.
from a former Creative Labs employee, props for getting an Audigy.
@@danielbarnes3406 I got a SoundBlaster Se card from Amazon...total shite the sound quality was awful(through a £1k Yamaha separates system) and loads of hiss/interference..... sent it right back.
Very Good Explanation !
Surely the easy answer is that if it was fine in a regular PCI slot then a PCIe x1 will be adequate?
Also, while I think it's understood, you don't emphasize the 'e' (the Express much so it sounds like you said 'PCI' with a trailing sound that's hard to make it.
I think it's also useful to understand that a PCIe lane is actualy an independent serial data stream as compared to old schools PCI devices use of parallel data transfer where you need the data from each line to reconstruct the transmitted data.
Serial communications scale much better in terms
If you want to install a sensorpanel and you use a panel with a hdmi connection , can you use a "hdmi to mini pci-e cable" to connect to your lcd ? Just to avoid you have to use the hdmi port on your grafics card and go out your case with the cable ...
I have a wifi card in my PCIex1 connecter. Thank goodness, a power surge blew out my onboard ethernet. No LEDs on back of mobo and ethernet adapter no longer shows up in the device manager. Dont have the money for a new mobo, so I am very happy my prebuilt came with a wifi card.
An X1 expansion card can be used in all size slots by the way
Very good explanation
That blue board with the 3 X1 slots and 2 'X16' slots looks to be 1 X16 and one X8 slot (look at the number of receptor pins in the lowest slot (left one))
Thank you!
My sound card uses that slot but my new board doesn't have any so I have to use a 16 lane. I have an x5 card (5 lane). It's a NIC.
You can also find some GPUs that use 1x slots.
Such GPUs are normally those GT710 type ones as they do not need x16 lanes.
You have Forgotten PCI-E NVME HOLDER Cards...
Ty Sir!1 Greatly appreciate your video!!
Thanks for this I have a couple of x1 slots empty so I will be using them I don`t really need to but it looks better
kind of with the part of x x2 x4 x8 and x16 being the only sizes. You also have x32 but the only places i see them is on custom motherboards and server motherboards. The reason for them has been to be support a breakout board of x16 or a combination of x16 and others maybe even 4 x16 slots running at a lower gen of pcie speed. So not a thing most consumers will use as using 4 x16 cards isn't a thing most consumers do anymore.
Good video. I have one question though. If there are 2 ports in a PCIe SATA expansion card running in a PCIe 2.0 x1 slot .. does each SATA port get only half the bandwidth i.e. 500 MB/s divided by 2, or can one port still run at 500 MB/s if the other port is not being used? A bit confused on this issue, thanks.
ive never seen that pcie splitter card. i would love a link to that or a 4x version, and maybe an enclosure that the cards could go into. ive been looking for something like this for a while now
Look for that mining stuff, they used to run x16 splitters
The biggest drawback of most PCIe x1 slots is that you can only fit x1 cards in them. Only a few high end boards have open end x1 slots which allow you to plug even x16 cards in them.
Ive cut the ends open on a old board once for dual gpu use (onlt had a 1x and 16x the rest were PCI) did work liek a charm but not all slots are equal and most are flemsy and will break.
My current board is budget oriented but does indeed have open ended pci 1x slots.
my bad x4 had to look LMFAO
@@CotyRiddle Sone newer boards also have m.2 slots in front of the x1 PCIe, so you can't put anything larger in there even with an open end slot.
@@BrunodeSouzaLino yup mine is like this. the m.2 slot *e keyed* for wifi/bluetooth is infront of one so the only way to use it is to remove the module.
Try an inexpensive pcie x1 riser, some have open ended x4 or even full x16s on the other end of the lead.
8x PCIex1 Devices start @4:06
* Wifi
* LAN
* Video Capture
* Sound Card
* TV Tuner
* SATA Expansion Card
* USB Expansion Card
* PCI Riser / Splitter
my motherboard (ASUS Crosshair VIII hero) doesn't have any x1 slots on it.
How to install mutiple card with many low end MB that only have one x1 pci-e slot? I miss the old MB with at least 3 pci slot.
1:46 your second "x16" slot is 8x according to pins you can see there on video
All true. But you forgot the X1 slots, granted arguably, best feature!
You can convert the interface to use a M.2 disk...
So clear that I understood it.
I have an x1 RAID card in my workstation at work. It's actually fine for the mirrored hard drives (not SSD!)
ok if you have clue what year it is > video starts 4:05 b4 this time it's old putter 101
Thanks for a great, well made and well explained video. Cheers. +1
I use my 1x PCIe slots for a D-Link AC 1200 Wifi adapter, a ASUS Xonar DGX sound card, and a Innatek USB 3.2 gen 2 adapter.
hey, another DGX user, how is it doing?
@@HappyBeezerStudios I no longer have it, I have a different motherboard with Realtek ALC1220. I still have a PCI Xonar DG though in my Dual Xeon Workstation.
@@HappyBeezerStudiosDriver support always seems to be the main crux of the sound cards that I have. The other one is boards that don't have ISA or PCI slots. Over the years I have had and replaced a lot of sound cards. Sound Blaster Vibra 16, AWE 64 GOLD, Yamaha DS-XG, PCI 128, PCI 512, Live! 5.1, Audigy 2, Audigy 4, Recon 3D, Xonar DG, DGX, SE. There were probably a few other ones. The Xonar SE stopped working though. Most of these cards I got cheap or free. Most of them I parted after not having a machine to use them in or them being compatible with Windows 10.