Dieter wrote:
Intel screwed up again. (Have they ever NOT screwed up?)
So I'm reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCIe
and discover a problem. A multilane card will
work (with reduced bandwidth) with fewer PCIe lanes,
but it will not fit into the smaller connector,
so this is only useful if your board has, say,
a x8 connector with 1 lane active. If the
mainboard has a x1 connector the expansion card
will not fit.
So if we wanted to build a card that could use
multiple lanes (say x4), it could not be used at
all in the common x1 slots. :-(
Unfortunately, this is the way it was designed. An x4 card must be
plugged into at least an x4 slot. I guess that there is a way to make a
fake x4 slot that has an x4 connector but only 1 or 2 lanes, but it is
the slot that handles this, not the card.
It certainly would have been better if the cards were able to handle
this and, therefore, be plugged into any size socket. Then the
connectors would be like PCI where a 32 bit card can be plugged into a
16 bit socket, but that isn't the way it was originally designed.
--
JRT
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