Halon
Gawd
- Joined
- Aug 13, 2004
- Messages
- 861
A) Most of the boards you linked are from around four years ago, when PCI compatibility had been winding down for a while but still existed as a niche for certain sectors.there are boards still made with PCI
https://www.asus.com/motherboards-components/motherboards/business/pro-a520m-c-csm/
B) This particular Asus board you've linked screams "industrial sector." Two PS/2 ports, hardwired RS-232, a VGA connector in addition to DVI-D and HDMI, and a PCI slot all indicate this was made for a target market more interested in legacy compatibility than raw performance. That is lent further credibility by the A520 northbridge. I'm currently trying to unload a DFI-ITOX SB600-C socket 1155 board on eBay with six vanilla PCI slots, and have done some research into this market at various times over the years.
C) From around socket AM3+ onward, PCI support on AMD boards is made possible by a PCI->PCIe bridge. That works fine for a comfortable majority of cards that play nicely with current operating systems, but is known to have compatibility wrinkles with certain old cards that try to access resources that were deprecated in the leap to PCI Express. It's more of a "good enough" PCI mimic than a fully conformant implementation.