I need an update

[WhiteMonkeyKing]

Ive been out of computers for about 2-3 years now...and alot of new stuff came out since then...i was wondering if anyone can explain to me whats going on ?haha....like PCI express, SLi and I think i heard something about being able to use two graphics cards like...dual chnl ram cept..with gfx cards? ...basically ive been out of the game and need an update

[Google]

[racing87stang]

PCI Express has replaced AGP. It gives us the bandwith to double that of AGP 16x rather than AGP 8x. By Spliting that bandwidth they run dual PCI-E cards running in SLI mode it almost doubles the graphics power, but in the same bandwidth. Motherboards like my a8n32-sli Increase the bandwidth to provide FULL 16x bandwidth on BOTH channels. That my update for you. Theres also Dual Core Processors, and DDR2 memory. Others can cover this for ya... Im burnt Good luck. Stick around and it will wave right on in.
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[fussnfeathers]

http://www.slizone.com/page/slizone_faq.html#g1

There's everything you need to know about SLI. Basically, how it works, is the two video cards are linked by a snap-on connector, then they split the workload, i.e. the first card will draw a frame, then the second card will draw the next, and so on. Basically, it increases memory bandwidth, by allowing each card to dedicate the full memory to each frame, unlike a single card that has to split the available memory between frames.

PCI Express (PCIe) is designed as a replacement for both the PCI bus and the AGP bus. The PCI standard requires that all slots share the common 133mb/s parallel pipeline, while PCI Express dedicates 200mb/s to each slot in a serial pipeline, point to point. That's for the PCIe 1x slots.

The PCIe 16x slot/s are roughly double the throughput of AGP 8x, 4.2gb/sec compared to 2.1gb/sec. The first SLI mobos with two 16x slots worked by splitting that pipe. With one vid card installed, the slot with the vid card would be 16x, while the second slot would be 1x for other add-in cards. When a second vid card was inserted, the 16x pipe would split between the two, so each slot would be 8x. About like having two AGP 8x slots working seperately. Newer SLI mobos have two true 16x slots, for a theoretical 32x graphics connection (technically 8.4gb/sec).

That's the technical stuff. Like he said ^^^^ up there, there's also dual core procs, DDR2 (which I'm sure you're aware of by now), high end vid cards now have 16 pipes or more, nVidia has SLI, ATI has Crossfire (basically the same concept, but uses an external cable rather than an internal chip-type connector), the BTX standard that's slowly, slowly taking hold, dual-layer DVD burners, etc etc etc..............alot of it isn't really "new", it's the same tech, just faster.
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