Introduction

PCI-E x1 has been sitting there and staring us blankly in the face for over a year now but what are we going to use it for? We have seen some RAID cards come out but they are not on the short list for everyone. We could see some sound cards that use the reduced bus speed slot this year. It would make sense that the increased bandwidth on offer from PCI Express over PCI and cards from Creative are becoming more feature-rich, we might see a use for the new slot.

What about a graphics card? No...but why? The thing is that while some might think that it's pointless to have a graphics card using PCI Express x1 slot, there are a number of good reasons why it should.

There are three key reasons why a PCI-E x1 graphics card can work and we'll show you why. Today we are checking out a GeForce 7300GT that utilizes DDR-3 memory and PCI-E x1 slot. We're going to have a look at what environments this could work in before we have a closer look at the card itself.

While we're at it though, we will also have a look at it from a performance perspective in a low-end graphics card environment - is PCI-E x16 nothing more the marketing mumbo jumbo like AGP 4x vs. 8x (1056MB/s vs. 2112MB/s respectively) back in the day or is there actually a performance difference? Considering there is a total of 500MB/s of bandwidth (Single Data Lane - Both Directions) available on x1 slots compared to that of the huge 8000MB/s of bandwidth compared to x16 slots, it will be interesting.

Let's have a look at where we think you could make use of a PCI-E x1 graphics card and if the Galaxy 7300GT is actually worth considering!