PCI Express 3.0 in 2010

The PCI-E 2.0 standard is quite common nowadays, all recent Intel, nVidia and AMD chipsets support it. The developments in the graphical performance are going very fast, nVidia's GTX 260/280 and ATI's Radeon HD 4800 series beat their predecessors by far. This speed has caused the PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) to already be working on the next standard, PCI-E 3.0. It's expected that the details of PCI-E 3.0 will be released in 2009, the first PCI-E 3.0 motherboards and graphics cards are due in 2010.  

 

The new standard offers more bandwidth, up to 8 gigatransfers a second (GT/sec). The current PCI-E 2.0 standard offers 5 GT/sec, only using 4 GT/sec effectively due to the overhead. This means that PCI-E 3.0 will double the bandwidth, PCI-SIG claims to have found a way to remove the overhead. 

On top of that, a PCI-E 3.0 slot will be able to deliver more power to a graphics card, probably up to 300 Watt. a PCI-E 2.0 slot can only transfer up to 150 Watt of power to a GPU.