People,
Perusing my latest edition of PC Magazine (August), I came across an article entitled: "A New Era For Desktops." The article discusses the new Intel (64-Bit ready) Chipset releases (915 & 925); and the various innovative technological improvements associated with new bus, storage & memory architectures.
One of the biggest improvements is the development of PCI Express, which is the new high-speed serial bus connection...w/ a wire-pair transfer rate of 2 GBps (upstream & downstream); & a total bandwidth of 500 MBps (all this in comparison to the existing parallel connection PCI bus, w/ a universal total bandwidth of 133 MBps.)
Aside from the obvious improvements for project studio PC recordists/native DAW users who grab one of these new machines, I was wondering:
1) Would existing PCI Cards from industry typical Audio Interfaces continue to work with this new architecture...would the existing Cards benefit from the improvements...or would we (& the industry) all be forced to upgrade?
2) Have any PC recording technical sources examined these new systems yet; & published findings (& if so...where are they)?
Thanks very much,
mark4man
Comments
You'll find that most of the new mobos with the new 915/925 chip
You'll find that most of the new mobos with the new 915/925 chipsets still have support for 2-3 PCI slots meaning if you've currently got a PCI audio interface it'll work fine.
What you'll have to look out for especially on the 925X mobos is there is no support for current DDR memory, as it's all been changed to the new DDRII which is 240pin and not backwards compatible.
You won't be forced to upgrade just yet as I think the PCI slot will still be with us for some time yet, just as the old ISA slot remained on mobos for quite a long time after PCI arrived.
The biggest concern for me at least is the HDD issue with only 1 40pin IDE connector. This is surely meant for optical drives while HDD's are all destined for SATA. Eventually the 40pin P-ATA interface will disappear altogether rendering any current P-ATA HDD's and Optical drives useless. So if you're in the market for a new HDD in the near future and want to be able to keep it for future upgrades, I seriously recommend going for SATA HDD's. Same for AGP cards, if you're in the market for an AGP card, buy a cheap one cause it's not going to go on a PCI-Xpress mobo.