[Sussex] Whats the difference?

[John Crowhurst]

On Sun, February 20, 2005 22:27, John D. said:
> Amongst other things, I've been dreaming about the possibility of
> getting a barebones system and then customising some of the components.

You'd be better off getting seperate components and building your own
'barebones' system.

> As far as I can see, most of the barebones systems available are pretty
> garbage i.e. trendy cube models which seem to lack expansion.

This is the trend, go for systems that have as much onboard as the user
could possibly want, then add a single AGP and PCI slot for the expansion
boards.

> Ideally, lots of pci slots would enable me to "play" to my hearts
> content, but now the buggers seems to be changing the ball game (again).
>
> I see that the latest standards of graphic card interface is PCI-x(16x),
> but I also have read reference to  "normal"  PCI-x slots and  PCI spdif
> out slots

PCI-x is backward compatible with the old PCI standard, its a much longer
slot size. The top end of PCI-x is 32 times faster than PCI-33.

spidif (Sony/Philips Digital Interface) is a sound connector, it could be
a phono plug or an optical connector.

PCI Express (PCIe) is the standard that isn't backward compatible, it has
a very small footprint. PCI Express uses serial communication rather than
parallel.

> Whats the difference between the latter and are they compatible in anyway?

--
John