How slow is PCI?

celliott · 23 Jun 2009 at 18:29

Another stupid question. Is PCI (Not PCI-E) adequete for a Gigabit network card, i.e. will it be able to do 100MB/s or will it be cripped by it?

Thanks

Chris1712 · 23 Jun 2009 at 18:33

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Local_Bus

Capacity 133 MB/s (32bit)

Yup. The chances of you maxing gigabit anyway are pretty slim, I rarely see sustained throughput over 75 ish.

HangTime · 23 Jun 2009 at 19:00

Be warned that the PCI bus is shared, so if will have to contend with any other PCI devices you have connected (soundcards, modems, usb expansions, raid controllers, NICs etc)

MagicBoy · 23 Jun 2009 at 19:04

I regularly get 45-50MB/sec sustained from the Gigabit PCI card in my old P4 (845 chipset). Onboard PCIe cards in my other machines (couple of Macs and a P5K-E Core 2) can hit just over 70 with a following wind.

Performance may well depend on the chipset. Older ones used PCI to communicate between the north and south bridge chips, later ones moved this to a separate bus.

celliott · 23 Jun 2009 at 20:28

I would be using this on an Atom board. The board I want which is completely passive only has a 100Mbit NIC, hence I want gigabit.

This would be the only PCI device so I presume I can expect around 80MB/s at least?

Duke · 23 Jun 2009 at 21:59

Will be fine, just get a decent make (chipset) like Intel or Broadcom.