Does anyone actually like express cards?

[Brennan Price]

As the title says, I want to know because I get the impression that not many people seem to like them... Personally, I love them.

 

Do you like express cards? And why?

[awesomes8wc3]

As in the expansion card thing for (unfortunately) older laptops? Hell yeah. I love that I can just add whatever I/O i want, since it's literally just PCIe you could probably even use it with video cards. I use one in my personal laptop (thinkpad W500) to add 3x USB3.0.

[manikyath]

i've only seen it actually used once. but i guess like a built in modem in a buisiness laptop (which was a thing until very recently) it has its slice of the market where people would gladly pay a premium to have it.

[themctipers]

I have three laptops with expresscard, but I've never used expresscard, or even seen one before.

 

The laptop I'm using (Lenovo 3000 N100) has all the damn IO I want, and even if I do buy expresscard, I can't use it in a new laptop I'm buying later this year.

I already have 4 USB 2 ports, a dedicated headphone and microphone 3.5mm female, 10/100 ethernet, a 1394 firewire port, a cd/dvd rw drive, vga, svideo, and even a fucking dial up mode

[michaelocarroll007]

17 minutes ago, awesomes8wc3 said:

As in the expansion card thing for (unfortunately) older laptops? Hell yeah. I love that I can just add whatever I/O i want, since it's literally just PCIe you could probably even use it with video cards. I use one in my personal laptop (thinkpad W500) to add 3x USB3.0.

Yeah External GPU with it can happen but it is bandwith limited to a point from my understanding even a GTX 1050 would be bottlenecked.

 

i have a XPS 17 from 2011/12 that has one i explored taking the wifi card out since it uses PCIE and trying a GPU externally because the CPU is still pretty decent. and was even more so 2 years ago when i was looking into it. has a Quad core older I7 first gen.  i ended up just building a Desktop though then trying that.  i am recently on the idea about it due to the fact im playing a lot of pubg and a friend of mine has no computer. I tried to play it on my laptop but a Laptop GPU from 5-6 years ago doesnt stand much of a chance gets like 45FPS at lowest 720p settings but lag spikes to 20 in battles. CPU doesnt go above 25% though while playing 

[CoalitionGaming]

I wish ExpressCard took off better considering its usefulness. And now with Thunderbolt on the rise, ExpressCard is sort of in the limelight as a precursor to that because Thunderbolt is a link to PCI-E, just like ExpressCard. Except ExpressCard wasn't guarded by Intel with many things, like External Graphics Cards, getting denied permission to use the Thunderbolt license because intel didn't want to (TB1 and TB2 era). None of that with ExpressCard. Sure its only 1 lane of PCI-E, but its been shown by many people that even 1 lane of PCI-E 2.0 or 3.0 is still enough bandwidth to for an eGPU to stomp all over integrated graphics or low end discrete graphics and help with rendering and other GPU intensive things or things that can be offloaded to GPUs. And who knows what it could have been improved to, possibly 4 lanes as some mini PCI-E slots are.

 

Also, ExpressCard eGPU docks like the GDC Beast or Bplus PE4c are inexpensive. Like $40 and $80 respectively. Not as nice as other docks like the Razor Core of DevilBox, but im sure we'd have affordable proper looking eGPU docks if ExpressCard was still an active standard.

[Brennan Price]

On 01/11/2017 at 12:29 PM, awesomes8wc3 said:

As in the expansion card thing for (unfortunately) older laptops? Hell yeah. I love that I can just add whatever I/O i want, since it's literally just PCIe you could probably even use it with video cards. I use one in my personal laptop (thinkpad W500) to add 3x USB3.0.

It is actually in newer laptops. I have one on my Dell Latitude E6330 and if I paired a mid-range card with it I would have a fairly decent gaming system. I love express card but like @CoalitionGaming said, Thunderbolt is taking the limelight and sadly they're not improving the express card for more features and use in more up to date laptops.