usefulness of PCI Express in the near future?

nah same. There are Giga net work cards and sata controllers however coming - the market for PCI-mini is pretty small too so cards are expensive. I can however think of many situations that would benefit from the smaller slot when they have limited real estate.

 

well we've had sound and network integrated into most chipsets for atleast a few years now.
Nforce2=
Pity they ditched soundstorm.

 

imho, they should switch to HTX. Low latancy 12.5 GBit/s each direction, and that's just the first revision of it! Not only that, but you can directly connect to the CPU, at least with AMDs anyways. I'm sure they can increase the tolerances for videocards too.

http://www.hypertransport.org/docucontrol/HTC20041015-0041-0006.pdf

 

Yeh my backup computer is a ASUS with NF2 and it has a soundstorm in it I believe. I must say very impressive for an onboard sound option even though I used a Creative Audigy 2 Card. (Dont know why I count on sound cards old habit to break away from still prefer them to this day ) I believe I read some where that on board sound gave better overall system results then an add in card.

 

not sure about that claim. Most onboard solutions are just connected via the PCI bus so there's not much gain there. In any 3D game the audigy lines come above most SB chip based solutions with the possible exception of SoundStorm. For instance in AMD world the MSI boards with the SBLive 'onboard' solution was shown with lower CPU utilisation than other AC/97 ones - which uses the cpu instead of dedicated hardware. I am no expert as you can probably tell. nvidia marketed the soundstorm as an 'APU' and i wish they continued it as an add in card or on their nforce4 products. May have influenced me to buy one. i did hear at the time that they didn't consider the PCI bus to have sufficient bandwidth to accommodate a plug in soundstorm card and other peripherals.

 

If you did read that somewhere then whoever wrote it was just plain wrong, they got it backwards.

Unless you're talking about an antique soundcard I think almost any add-in card would be preferable over onboard from a performance standpoint.

 

Well.. the MSI mobo that has an SB Live! built into is practically an onboard sound solution with the performance of an add in card...

There are certain mobos that take extra effort to add in decent hardware acceleration to an onboard sound solution... DFI comes to mind with their "Karajan module". If you are looking for onboard hardware accelerated sound solutions... DFI mobos aren't a bad option. I can't think of any other mobo manufacturer off the top of my head (other than MSI) that has something like it.

 

Hmmm, well I did not know that. My bad.

But I'd call that the exception to the rule, I think unless you know what you're doing avoiding onboard sound is a safe bet.

 

Something to refer to I guess:
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2465&p=27

I forgot about Abit's "Audio Max" solution.. in any case...

Some people may prefer a mobo that has decent onboard hardware accelerated sound to avoid using another slot (or buying another Creative sound card)... so it has its value.

 

yeah I am using the onboard sound for my ULi based board and it is slowly driving me nuts!
Not worried about the CPU hit as it's a dual core system and the system is so vid card limited but I get some really wierd sounds when I scroll a window or the cpu is based under load. I came from a nforce2 Soundstorm system and that was a real step above this even with the crappy codec chip which I think was a realteck 650 (ASUS Deluxe ax7n-rev2...maybe)

 

Matrox has 1x video cards.