Use found for PCIe adaptor

I MAY, PERHAPS, have been a little too harsh on the Japanese adaptor I spotted that allows you to plug a PCI card into a PCIe x1 adaptor.

I stand by my attitude that it is still of rather limited appeal, however, as a few of you pointed out, while it would not be of much use with a full height PCI card, the DCT-FUTA1 would happily accept one of the half height cards designed for 2U server chassis environments, such as the Firewire card below.

Shipped with a bracket that has a nice big gap for you to plug things into, it's unlikely to pass any EMC radio emissions tests, but should provide enthusiasts with a way of getting that PCI card into their system.

Anything in this slot would also get the full dedicated PCI bandwidth, one of the key benefits of the PCIe Point-to-Point infrastructure whereas, on your older system, it would have had to share this with the contents of any other slots, and any on-board PCI controllers, such as SATA adaptors or Gigabit ethernet, which can be quite bandwidth hungry. On the flip side, there may well be some performance overheads of the bridge chip which negates this advantage.

The only real remaining problems are that, at around $45, it's not exactly cheap, and that there is such a limited number of half-height PCI cards that would be of that much practical use. Peripheral manufacturers listen up: people are crying out for low profile TV tuners and decent value SCSI adaptors that are half height, to use with one of these, or fit natively into a PCIe x1 slot. Or at least our more vocal readers are. µ

L'INQ
Digital Cowboy