Is a 32 bit pci nic any faster than an older 16bit isa nic???

[picardal]

Just wondering, I have used both types of cards... but I am going to set up a network between 2 computers in my house and would like to know if one is quicker than the other🙂
thx

 

[dutchboy]

no, actually, simple math will tell you that 16 is higher than 32😉

 

[BlueScreenVW]

Generally yes.

 

[DeeK]

Faster? Probably not. Less of a throttle on the CPU? Probably.

 

[ukDave]

the speed of transfering data will be pretty much the same, but i noticed that it did take longer to log onto my home network. So i bought a new cheap PCI Netgear NIC. That made it better. I would therefore go for a PCI because they are sooo cheap and much more easy to configure (plug and play etc.)

dave

 

[Mookow]

The ISA bus is 16 bits wide and 8MHz (or at least I think it is... anyone who knows differently please correct me). That means it can transfer 16 * 8 Mbits/sec = 128Mbits/sec. Thus, it should be able to handle a 100 Mbit Ethernet connection... in theory. I dont recall ever seeing a 10/100 ISA NIC, though. In general, if I were you, I'd buy 10/100 PCI NICs.
I seen to remember that the bandwidth on ISA was 16Mbit, but when I did the math again... anyway, like I said, I could be wrong.

 

[LocutusX]

The theoretical bandwidth of the ISA bus is not at issue here. Because the ISA bus did not support bus-mastering, the greater the data throughput, the greater the load on the CPU.

For example, several years ago when I had an SMC EtherEZ on a PPro166 machine, I couldn't even max out a mere 10mbps switched network connection. Once I got past 500KB/s my CPU usage would by at 100% (in NT4 SP4) and wouldn't be able to go any higher... not to mention my mouse pointer would start lagging and I couldn't do anything else on the computer.

Replacing that with one of many PCI NICs (99.9% of PCI NICs are bus-mastering) allowed me to max out a 10mbps connection with less than 8% CPU usage.

 

[picardal]

wow, haha----i take it that i should change nics huh...🙂
I have an old Isa card in my new kk266 motherboard🙂
ill try it out and just put the isa in the older computer that wont be used as the main server...
thx guys

 

[Jasonh100]

<< I seen to remember that the bandwidth on ISA was 16Mbit, but when I did the math again... anyway, like I said, I could be wrong. >>



divide 128 megabits by 8 and you get 16 megabytes. just a thought

 

[Mookow]

jasonh100,
yeah, I had considered that... but I had been highly sure of it being bit, not byte... oh well, guess I'll just mumble it when I talk about it... j/k