page_title: PCI Express
section_title: Applications
hierarchical_section_title: PCI Express / Applications
caption_attribution_description: English: SATA&#160;3.0 (6&#160;Gbit/s) host bus adapter (HBA), based on the Marvell 88SE9128 controller, in form of a PCI Express ×1 expansion card. Its RAID functionality is provided through proprietary firmware and drivers.
context_page_description: PCI Express, officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard, designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP bus standards. It is the common motherboard interface for personal computers' graphics cards, hard drives, SSDs, Wi-Fi and Ethernet hardware connections. PCIe has numerous improvements over the older standards, including higher maximum system bus throughput, lower I/O pin count and smaller physical footprint, better performance scaling for bus devices, a more detailed error detection and reporting mechanism, and native hot-swap functionality. More recent revisions of the PCIe standard provide hardware support for I/O virtualization.
  Defined by its number of lanes, the PCI Express electrical interface is also used in a variety of other standards, most notably the laptop expansion card interface ExpressCard and computer storage interfaces SATA Express, U.2 and M.2.
  Format specifications are maintained and developed by the PCI-SIG, a group of more than 900 companies that also maintain the conventional PCI specifications.
context_section_description: PCI Express operates in consumer, server, and industrial applications, as a motherboard-level interconnect (to link motherboard-mounted peripherals), a passive backplane interconnect and as an expansion card interface for add-in boards.
  In virtually all modern (as of 2012) PCs, from consumer laptops and desktops to enterprise data servers, the PCIe bus serves as the primary motherboard-level interconnect, connecting the host system-processor with both integrated-peripherals (surface-mounted ICs) and add-on peripherals (expansion cards). In most of these systems, the PCIe bus co-exists with one or more legacy PCI buses, for backward compatibility with the large body of legacy PCI peripherals.
  As of 2013 PCI Express has replaced AGP as the default interface for graphics cards on new systems. Almost all models of graphics cards released since 2010 by AMD (ATI) and Nvidia use PCI Express. Nvidia uses the high-bandwidth data transfer of PCIe for its Scalable Link Interface (SLI) technology, which allows multiple graphics cards of the same chipset and model number to run in tandem, allowing increased performance. AMD has also developed a multi-GPU system based on PCIe called CrossFire. AMD, Nvidia, and Intel have released motherboard chipsets that support as many as four PCIe x16 slots, allowing tri-GPU and quad-GPU card configurations.
  Note that special power cables called PCI-e power cables are required for high-end graphics cards.
caption: A Marvell-based SATA 3.0 controller, as a PCI Express x1 card
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