What is the bandwidth that PCIe x16, x8, x4 and x2 card slots run at?

I think the different size PCIe card slots run at different bandwidths. What's better about the different bandwidths? Is PCIe x16 the best one for a video card? What's good about the PCIe x2 card slot? What are all the different size PCIe card slots good for? What's better about PCIe than is about regular PCI? What bandwidth does regular PCI run at?|||Basically, the difference is in the available peak bandwidth. But PCI-E x16 slots also provide more available power (75 watts for PCI-E 1.x, 150 watts for PCI-E 2.x). PCI maxed out at 25W.



Standard PCI's peak bandwidth is 133 MB/s (or 127, depending on how you measure). PCI-X got this up to 1.06GB/s, and later revisions and extensions got this all the way up to 4.3GB/s. But PCI-X never really caught on. (In fact, I don't think the 4.3GB/s version was ever implemented in a commercial product.)



The original PCI-E specification provided 250 MB/s per lane, in each direction. So x4 would be four times that or 1GB/s in each direction. x16 would be 16 times that, or 4GB/s. PCI-Express 2.0 and 2.1 doubled that.



By the way, while PCI-E x2 and x12 are electrically possible. there are no slots specified for these configurations. They are sometimes used internally on motherboards, for example to connect southbridges to SATA controllers.|||I like this answer.

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|||Yes, they are all rated on different speed.



PCIe is faster than PCI



PCIe x16 is faster than PCIe x8



PCIe x16 is standard in this day and age. All recent video cards use that slot type.



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