pci express videocard through pci slots?

[jcbray]

I heard of an (at this time unreleased I believe) external pci-express thing, targeted mainly at laptop users I believe...

I've heard of PCI-e to AGP, but not any other way....


btw, SLI isn't a plug, it's a PCI-e socket that can run SLI...looks identical to a pci-e socket, and can still run ATI cards, etc.

[lots]

Indeed, SLI is provded mostly by drivers (and a hardware piece that fits between two cards). It is not the slot. SLI uses standard PCIe slots.

PCI Express has an external spec which allows someone to plug in a PCIe device by an external plug (much like firewire or any other external spec [e-SATA for example]), but this still requires the motherboard to support PCIe (the external connection has to go through a PCIe controller still). Anyway, the spec has been released already, there are just no devices to show for it ;) But as said above, this shows great potential for power graphics on the notebook without having to worry about other specs in the notebook.

There is absolutly no way your friend can install a new graphcis card that is PCIe or AGP. The only options available are PCI based. These solutions can be better than his onboard card, but they will not be anywhere near the power of AGP or PCIe solutions.

[Ice Czar]

the main difference between the interfaces is the bus width and its clock frequency
thus anything attached to a narrower and slower bus gets choked down to that bus

PCI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_Component_Interconnect) 32bits 33MHz 133MB/s

PCI-X (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI-X) 64bit up to 133MHz up to 1064MB/s
(not on your "typical" mobo, and not generally for PCI graphics cards)

AGP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Graphics_Port) x8 32bit *66MHz 2133MB/s
(* strobed 8 times per clock for an effective 533MHz)

PCI-E (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express) bus width depends on the number of lanes its also a duplex standard
First-generation PCIe is often quoted to support a data rate of 250 MB/s in each direction, per lane. This figure is a calculation from the physical signalling rate (2.5 Gbaud) divided by the encoding overhead (10bits/byte.) This means a 16 lane (x16) PCIe card would then be theoretically capable of 250 * 16 = 4 GB/s in each direction. While this is correct in terms of data bytes, more meaningful calculations will be based on the usable data payload rate, which depends on the profile of the traffic, which is a function of the high-level (software) application and intermediate protocol levels.

in other words, without the motherbioard having a chipset to natively support the bus (as lots mentions), its pretty pointless to adapt a faster card then try to stuff it through a smaller hose. Even if you can find such an adapter.

A PCI graphics card will do a decent job of 2D
But its very likey his integrated GPU would kick its butt.

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