pci slots ?

**rpkaboom** · June 25th, 2006, 04:24 AM

hey, whats the different between these two pci slots, i was looking at the make of his motherboard and it says he has 4 32 bit pci slots, and he's got a creative audigy 2 zs i think but that needs a pci 2.1 slot.

**elroy** · June 25th, 2006, 10:52 AM

Standard PCI is 32 bit and operates at 33mhz, throughput is 133Mb per sec

PCI 2.1 supports 3.3 and 5 volt cards, 64 bit slots and 66mhz capability,
32 bit throughput @ 66mhz = 266Mb per second
64 bit throughput @ 66mhz = 532 Mb per second

PCI 2.1 came out in 1995, so anything since then is going to have a PCI 2.1 or 2.3 slot. All this means you should be able to use that card in any pc made in the last 10 years.
BTW, PCI 2.3 no longer supports 5 volt cards. These would be fairly old cards.

**rpkaboom** · June 25th, 2006, 12:10 PM

http://www.soundblaster.com/products...uct=4915&nav=4 check under requirements and it says it needs a pci 2.1 and when i look at the bottom of my card it wont fit into a pci slot .

so it wont fit.

**Atomic Rooster** · June 25th, 2006, 12:19 PM

From the looks of your drawing, it sounds like he has an old Soundblaster 16 ISA card. Does the card's connector resemble this one?

**rpkaboom** · June 25th, 2006, 12:20 PM

no, the connectro look like the one on this card http://www.kustompcs.co.uk/acatalog/info_4051.html

**Peter M** · June 25th, 2006, 04:01 PM

The slot keying denotes the signalling voltage of the slot. The pictured card has both notches, indicating that it lives in 3.3V and 5V slots likewise.

Your mainboard of course has only one key tab, in a desktop board that'll typically be the one toward the rear. That indicates it's a 5V slot.

Thus, no problem there.

What level of PCI protocol your board's chipset implements is an entirely different question. Given that PCI 2.1 has been introduced almost ten years ago, I wouldn't worry about that.

**Peter M** · June 25th, 2006, 04:02 PM

btw, elroy, PCI 2.3 still does support 5V cards - it just deprecates their use. 5V support has actually been dropped in PCI 3.0 ... and that's why you don't see PCI 3.0 support advertized for desktop mainboards. In that market, we still get the same ancient 33-MHz 32bit 5V slots we got when PCI was introduced in 1993 or so.