PCI X1300 cards go on sale

YOU'D BE HARD pushed to find a modern PC without PCI express graphics these days, however the upgrade market for older machines is far from dead.

Many OEMs have, for years, based their low-end systems on Intel's knobbled chipsets, such as the 845GV and the 915GL, which do not feature any high speed graphics port, be it AGP or PCIe x16.

The reason for this is of course pricing, but you may be surprised at the way it is done.

For example, choose a "performance" north bridge from Intel and your motherboard assembler can be paying somewhere in the region of $15, plus a similar amount for the south bridge.

Pick the knobbled version with no external graphics port and low-speed version of the built-in graphics, and the south bridge price remains the same, but the North Bridge price can drop… to $2! Remember that's for the same piece of silicon.

The net result: crack open your cheap Dell and you probably won't find any way of expanding the graphics… apart from PCI!

It was a fairly trivial task to turn an AGP board into a PCI one, as AGP was essentially a dedicated 66MHz PCI channel with some extra control signals to allow the faster transfer modes to operate. PCI express, however is very different on an electrical level.

The good news for people stuck with these PCs is that Japanese manufacturer Kurouto Shikou has come up with a neat solution, and it uses a chip from bridge makers PLX to provide a PCI to PCI express link.

This only gives one PCIe lane to the ATI chip, but since you're limited to old PCI on the other side, it shouldn't matter too much.

The current Kurouto Shikou card is a low profile X1300 with 128MB of RAM, so not exactly high end, but a big boost for an old PC, and enough to at least allow DX9 games to run, and provide a DVI interface and video acceleration to connect you to your HDTV. µ

L'Inqs
PLX Bridge chip
Akiba shop pics of board