ISA vs PCI?

[quakguy]

so I have $100 to spend and was thinking of upgrading my soundblaster awe32 and old 10baseT NIC to a soundblaster live value and a cheap $20 pci 10/100 NIC.

I did some searches and couldn't find ANY information/benchmarks that could help me decide if it was worth it. Many old articles I could find would just state that PCI cards would use much less CPU cycles and quote something like 3-10% for PCI and up to 40% for ISA.. yet no benchmarks to back up the statements.

Does anyone have links to benchmarks with this sort of thing in mind? or have done a similar upgrade? I'm more a framerate person and don't care much about the EAX, 3D sound, etc. Will replacing these old ISA cards improve framerates for games in general? under what conditions? under 5fps increase and I figure it's not worth it..otherwise I'll just buy a bigger HD because this 8.4gb is really cramped.

 

[morriswindgate]

For the NIC go with the ISA. ISA is still faster than your broadband can handle.

 

[RickH]

If you have the PCI slot get a NetGear PCI 10/100 card for $10-20. Why go with old technology?? PCIs are easier to setup!!!!! It is hard to find a motherboard with an ISA slot anymore. You also may want to transfer this card to another PC in the future. I upgraded a friends old socket 7 PC to a duron board but the "cards" cost more than the motherboard. He had an ISA modem, NIC, soundcard and SCSI card. Buying PCI cards doubled the upgrade cost.

 

[Shmorq]

I'm not certain of this, but I believe PCI network cards have lower CPU usage.