pci, pci e, pci e x16? help explain

There is no just plain PCI e(express) There's PCI express 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x, 16x, and I've heard of a 32x... Just look at the slot. Most all GPUs today are PCI Express 16x.

The first link didn't work... Just get the cheapest card. I seriously doubt those speeds would make much of any difference. It's not like you couldn't bump it up a bit yourself if you wanted to anyway.
 
Not really, no... 25 and 50Mhz wouldn't be that noticeable... I'm sure that if you monitored the FPS you could tell the difference, but when you're playing I wouldn't guess that you would notice much.

As for PCI-E, it comes in several different types. To my knowledge, there is PCI-E x16, x8, x4, and x1, although there might me more. x16 is what nearly all PCI-E graphics cards run, and is what you will see on nearly every board, usually one, but sometimes two if the board supports SLI or Crossfire (dual graphics cards).

x1 is the other common one, but it is easy to tell the difference... PCI-E x1 slots are only about an inch long, and are used for network cards, expansion cards, etc... there are very few PCI-E x1 graphics cards available, so when looking at cards, if it says PCI-E, it's reasonably same to assume it is x16

Did this clear it up for you?
 
yes thank you PohTayToez and everyone.

PohTayToez
"so when looking at cards, if it says PCI-E, it's reasonably same to assume it is x16"

thank you because I when I was looking at boxes for graphic cards they had PCI-E in the circle in the front part of the box and I was like PCI-E or PCI-E x16? So that pretty much brought me to this question.

thanks again everyone
 
If it just says PCI-E, it will be PCI-E x16. While video cards for other PCI-E slots do exist, they are very unusual, and will be explicitly marked.
 
As others have said, if it's a video card that says PCI-E, then they generally mean PCI-E x16. But a PCI-E x1, x4, x8, etc will work in an x16 slot.
 
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