PCI Lives!
Here we are, in 2008, heading for the PCI Express 3.0 standard and Albatron Technology comes along and claims that millions of integrated motherboards without AGP or PCI Express slots are still produced. OK, you might find a few AGP cards these days, but cards for the old PCI slot? Are there millions of PC owners that haven’t made the jump for PCI-e yet? I find that quite hard to believe. Anyway, Albatron considered that it’s unacceptable to forget about that many potential buyers of discrete graphics cards, so they went ahead and released an array of GeForce 8 series cards designed for the old PCI slot.
The new PCI lineup includes 3 models: PCI8600GT-256X, PCI8500GT-256X and PCI8400GS-256. The company claims these products not only increase performance, but also increase the number of connectable monitors up to two, three or even four, which wasn’t possible with any previous PCI card.
Albatron did some preliminary tests and came to the conclusion that the new graphics cards considerably surpass current integrated graphics solutions from Intel. In 3DMark2006 the discrete cards running on the PCI slot outperformed Intel 915G by up to 1329% (on a Pentium-4 520 2.8GHz, 1GB DDR2-800 platform).
All three cards are low-profile solutions that feature DVI (Dual-Link), TV-Out (HDTV) and HDMI interfaces. The PCI8600GT (pictured above) has 540/1188/800 MHz clock rates, while PCI8500GT operates at 450/918/800 MHz. There's no information about the third card for now, but that would be the cheapest of the three. Prices should be way below $100.
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