[merlinxi]

Can someone tell me what the heck the TINY PCI ports on the new PCI-E express boards are used for???

[The_Neon_Cowboy]

thier PCIe 4X slots, used for TV tuners, PPU's and other future devices
currenly only thing I've seen are SATA2 controller cards

[Matth]

4x or even 1x slots - mind you, a PCI-E 1x has 250MB/s bandwidth capability to itself, compared to the 133MB/s shared across the entire PCI subsystem.

It wasn't needed for graphics as AGP would surely have evolved into AGP 16x if required, but the areas where it DOES score are nothing like as common yet.

[H3X4D3C1M4L]

Originally Posted by The_Neon_Cowboy

currenly only thing I've seen are SATA2 controller cards

Never seen this then?