Is PCI E 2.0 is downgradable

[Bartholomew]

Hi,
I want to know the difference between PCI E and PCI E 2.0. If I get a motherboard with PCI E 2.0 then will my old gpu will work on it. That means does it supports downgrading. I am not sure about this. I know that PCI E 2.0 is faster then the old one but the main query remains on the compatibility issue. Every time you cannot get a new hardware and leaving the old one for no use. Thanks in advance.

[Marthaz]

The version only determines to increase the speed and performance of the gpu's. That does not means that new version of gpu's will only work on PCI E 2.0. And other thing it can downgrade. You can use your old cards with a higher speed. Here is a small specification. For PCI 1.x version the clock speed is 1.25 GHz, 2.5 gt/s transfer rate, 250 mb/s data rate. This things keeps on increasing as the version rises. Like for PCI E 2.0 version 2.5Ghz is the clock, 5 Gt/s is transfer and 500 mb/s is the data transfer. Then 3.0 offers much higher performance of 4 Ghz clock, 8Gt/s and 4 Gb/s transfer rate.

[ApPy10]

You can understand that the new pci e version will increase your graphic performance up to 25 to 35 percent. The motherboard quality does not matter hear. The PCI version are only to give an optimize performance. You do not need to worry that your old card will not be compatible to PCI E 2.0 which works on PCI E. It is only design to increase the performance up to 7 to 8 percent.

[Team Leader]

PCI Express 2.0 doubles the data transfer rate. For example the data gets an broader way to move. The expansion of this cards replace the older version of PCI, PCI-X and agp standards. It support downgrade and new gpu's. The PCI E 2.0 is backward and forward compatible. Here the main function of PCIe 2.0 is that it doubles the interconnect bit rate from 2.5 GT/s to 5 GT/s. It increases the bandwidth data transfer upto 16 GB/s. The higher bandwidth allow higher performance. PCIe 2.0 is the fastest expansion slot in today's scenario.