Desktop & Server Serial Cards

Desktop PCs and Servers have internal slots allowing for serial cards to be connected. These slots are either newer PCI Express slots or the older PCI slot or maybe a mixture of both. Even though the slots have similar sounding names, they are not interchangeable - PCI cards cannot fit into PCI Express slots and PCI Express cards cannot fit into PCI slots.

Brainboxes manufacture an extensive range of PCI and PCI Express cards with 1 to 8 ports, RS232 or RS422/485, low profile or standard height, and with or without cables.

PCI and PCI Express Comparison

	PCI	Universal PCI	PCI Express
Brainboxes Range
	CC	UC	PX
Slot Compatibility	Only 1 Key Way: Can only be inserted in 5V PCI slots	2 Key Ways: Can be inserted in either 3.3V or 5V PCI slots	Can be inserted into ANY PCIe slot (x1,x2,x4,x8,x16)
Height	PCI Express boards are the same height and length as PCI cards
Bracket	PCI Express uses the same card brackets as PCI boards, either standard or Low Profile

Low Profile and Standard Height

Both PCI and PCIe cards can come in different heights. The height effects which kind of computer the card can fit into. Low Profile (or half height or low height) fit into slim PC's and servers. A general rule of thumb is that if the height of your PC (including case) is less than 4 inches ( 100mm) then it requires a low profile card. 

PCI Spec

Conventional PCI (part of the PCI Local Bus standard and often shortened to PCI) is a computer bus for attaching hardware devices in a computer. These devices can take either the form of an integrated circuit fitted onto the motherboard itself, called a planar device in the PCI specification, or an expansion card that fits into a slot. The name PCI is an initialism formed from Peripheral Component Interconnect. The PCI Local Bus is common in modern PCs, where it has displaced ISA and VESA Local Bus  as the standard expansion bus, and it also appears in many other computer types. Despite the availability of faster interfaces such as PCI-X and PCI Express, conventional PCI remains a very common interface.

PCIe Spec

PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe (or PCI-E, as it is commonly called), is a computer expansion card standard designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X, and AGP standards. PCIe 2.1 is the latest standard for expansion cards that is available on mainstream personal computers.

PCI Express is used in consumer, server, and industrial applications, as a motherboard-level interconnect (to link motherboard-mounted peripherals) and as an expansion card interface for add-in boards. A key difference between PCIe and earlier buses is a topology based on point-to-point serial links, rather than a shared parallel bus architecture.