CSA worth it?

[Lord Evermore]

The PCI bus hasn't had to deal with network traffic in most chipsets for awhile. Integrated network controllers have been native to the southbridge for a couple of years. The only bus that has any concern for network traffic is the chipset interconnect, assuming you're not comparing an external GigE controller. So using 10/100 integrated networking isn't really going to have any different performance to using a CSA network controller on a 100Mbps network. The real difference in performance with a PCI controller causing bursts of traffic and a CSA controller for standard use can't possibly be significant enough to make it a deciding factor unless the inclusion of CSA were the only difference between boards. Especially with the ICH5R with SATA RAID (or even just the ICH5's SATA), audio is about the only thing most users will have running on the PCI bus, and even that doesn't happen if you use the integrated audio. The PCI bus really is almost unused with modern chipsets and integrated functions. It's unfortunate that Abit chose not to enable the integrated network controller on the IC7 in order to make the IC7-G look better.