Mobo expansion slots - PCI-E vs PCI questions

[tankman1989]

edit - found solution -
IDK if anyone else has been confused about how the slots work and how the rating work but I found this article and it explains it very nicely. Maybe this will help anyone else who may have similar questions.

http://www.tested.com/tech/457440-theoretical-vs-actual-bandwidth-pci-express-and-thunderbolt/

I need to order some new cards for my system and I'm a little confused about what these slots are on my motherboard. The pictures of the board aren't matching up with what I am seeing with the one that I have for some reason. The board I'm working on is an Asus p8z77-v Deluxe.

I have my video card installed in the top (blue) PCI-E slot so I am guessing that I can use one of the two bottom ones for this expansion card.

I guess what I am confused about is what are these little slots used for, the 4 small blue ones.

Here is the Asus

This is the configuration of the card I am installing (Intel Pro PCI-Express Network card):

This is the board I though I had:

Are there many cards that use the really small connector, the PCI Express x1? I haven't seen many but I haven't really been looking for them either. I'm interested in knowing more about the PCI-E archtecture and how it really works with interacting with other slots. I'm now worried that this machine has no regular PCI slots - I wonder why they couldn't make PCI-E backwards compatible to PCI.

Anyway, if anyone can help out here I'd appreciate it!

 

[Markverhyden]

The second picture has two regular PCI slots (light blue). The top one only has pci-e. And that matches the manual Alice posted.

 

[TAPtech]

That NIC is a bit odd, most of the single port NIC's I see that are PCI-E will fit into the small PCI-E slots. Looks like yours will need the big one though as it seems to have a few more pins on it.

 

[BrentfromZulu]

In the first pic, there are 4 PCI-e x1 slots, 1 pci-e x16 slot, and 1 pci-e slot at x8, and the last one at x4 (Educated Guessing)

The 3rd Pic is 2 PCI-e x1 Slots, 1 PCI-e x16, 1 PCI-e x8 , 1 PCI-e x4, and 2 PCI Slots.

The second pic looks like a NIC that requires a x4 lane. That is a little weird, as usually I would presume that it would only require 1 lane, but that one looks like it requires a few more lanes.

 

[tankman1989]

Ok, I didn't say that it was a dual port NIC. I also have some NIC's that are 4 port (all Intel Pro gigabit) and they all have the same pin configuration. It just seemed odd that it was almost the size of the small slots but just a little too big. I guess I had always looked at the PCI-E x4 and x1 as the same size as I didn't know too much about them.

IDK if anyone else has been confused about how the slots work and how the rating work but I found this article and it explains it very nicely. Maybe this will help anyone else who may have similar questions.

http://www.tested.com/tech/457440-theoretical-vs-actual-bandwidth-pci-express-and-thunderbolt/