DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PCI & PCI-EXPRESS.

What is PCI?

PCI stands for 'PERIPHERAL COMPONENT INTERCONNECT'.This is a connection within the system motherboard. These include sound cards, video cards, LAN cards & RAID cards. The predecessor to PCI was ISA - which was one of the carrier connection type in modern computers.

What is PCI - Express ?

PCI-E is the latest incatation of peripheral interconnection. It is destined to replace PCI, especially in the word of video cards. Most modern motherboards have PCI-E built-in. The speed of PCI-E is another key difference between PCI & PCI-E.

PCI vs PCI-E.

• PCI-E uses a serial interface & alows for point to point interconnections between these connections points. This differs from previous PCI bus architectures that used a shared, parallel bus architecture.
• PCI cards have a peek transfer rate of 133MB/S. Where as PCI-E cards have data transfer rate of 16GB/S.

SUMMARY

1. PCI-E is much faster compared to PCI.
2. PCI-E uses serial interface while PCI uses parallel interface.
3. PCI-E speed is classified into lanes, each capable of delivering upto 1GB/S data transfer.
4. PCI slots are standarized while PCI-E slots are very depending on the no.of lanes the slot is intended for.
5. Despite PCI-E superiority, most manufacturers still use the PCI standard for their devices.

I hope that this blog would help the viewer's to get the basic idea of PCI & PCI - Express.

:-)Thanks for viewing !