PCI and PCI-X are not directly compatible, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that means you’re out of luck if you need to use a PCI-X card in a machine that only has basic PCI slots.

The common hardware interface in PCs, Macs and other computers for connecting peripheral devices such as storage drives and graphics cards. PCI Express ... least one PCIe slot for graphics.

Since the mainboard used also offered PCIe, the same card was run in a PCIe x4 slot, as well as in an x1 configuration, both with noticeably higher performance and putting the ‘why’ in ‘try’.

If the implementation will be a PCI Express endpoint – like most embedded applications – FPGAs will most-likely be the ideal choice. Today's high-end 90nm FPGAs such as the Virtex-4 family offer ...