Card Slot Identification
Identifying the card slots on a motherboard
There are many different card slot types that you will run in to here at Free Geek, so it can be rather challenging to determine which type you are looking at. An I/O (Input/Output) bus slot allows the user to add components to the computer, increasing the systems capability of performing to the users needs or wants. Below are some guidelines to help determine the slot type on the motherboard and the slot on the card itself.
But before we can discuss these we must talk about the basic motherboard layout. To arrange the board so that you can easily find the card slots, you should take an example board and turn it so that the on-board cluster or AT keyboard connector is facing you. Now you can see the card slots to the right of the on-board connectors.
The most reliable ways to identify them are:
1. Checking the distance between the outside of the box on the motherboard and the beginning of the pins AGP slot will have more than a 2 3/4" gap between plate and pins PCI slot has a slightly more than a 1" gap between plate and pins PCI-express video slot will have approximately 1 1/4" between plate and pins ISA slot will have a little more than a 1/2" gap between the plate and pins 2. Looking at the connector contact openings on the slots themselves AGP slot has connector openings that are very fine and close together PCI slot has connectors that are much bigger than either the AGP or PCI-e slots PCI-e slot has connectors that are very small and fine, similar to the AGP ISA slot has very large connectors in which the metal contacts can easily be seen
There are standard colors for the card slots: black for I.S.A., tan for P.C.I. brown for A.G.P. but that does not mean that all motherboard vendors will stick with those colors. So you cannot rely on the colors of the slot plastic to be able to identify them.
Below is the description and some more technical information about the card slot types for your information.
The PCI slot
The Peripheral Component Interconnect is a bus slot type commonly known as PCI. The PCI slot has a bit rate of 32 bits and can handle a multitude of different card functions from network cards to USB expansion, so if you have a need for these, this is the slot to fill it. Physically the card slot starts about 1 1/2 inches from the back of the motherboard. The slot itself is about 3 1/4 inches long.
The AGP slot
The Accelerated Graphics Port or AGP is solely for graphics cards, from 32 to 64 bits of video pleasure. This is the card that allowed 3D graphics for gamers to get more out of their game. Physically the card slot starts about 2 3/4 inches from the back of the motherboard. The slot itself is about 2 5/8 inches long.
The PCI-E slot
The Peripheral Component Interconnect Express card or PCI-E slots can very in sizes from ** to and is found about 1 1/4 in from the back of the mother board. There are two types of the card slot. One is for video card known as a PCI-E 16x slot type and the other is a small slot type known as PCI-E 8x. The 8x card slot is designed to be as versatile as the standard PCI slot in the wide array of cads that can function in this slot. This card slot is 4x faster then the speed of the PCI bus. That means that there is a Gigabyte of information going to and from the card.
The ISA slot
The Industry Standard Architecture slot was first implemented in the early 1980's by IBM. This card was capable of transferring data to and from the computer, opening up a world of possibilities from printing to networking with other computers. The 8 bit technology of the ISA card was soon improved upon and a 16 bit bus was implemented. Increasing the slot and card length allowed for data to transfer much faster. The bright side of the new architecture was that you could still use a 8 bit card in a 16 bit slot, allowing users who could only afford a new computer and not new cards to maintain the usability of their new computer. While the 8 bit ISA slot and 16 bit ISA slot differ in length they both start 1 inch from the back of the motherboard.