oh shi-
Member 445
Level 24.23
Mar 2006
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Aug 29, 2006, 04:12 PM
Local time: Aug 29, 2006, 01:12 PM
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#1 of 10
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Using up CPU cycles isn't as important as using bus bandwidth these days. Having a bunch of dedicated PCI cards in one system is a very bad idea because they are all sharing a 133MB/sec bus. Hell, just a Gigabit Ethernet card running at capacity will eat up most of the bus bandwidth. Forget putting anything else on the bus if you are using a SATA PCI card as well. SATA-II can't even run on a PCI card, those require a 64-bit PCI slot (PCIe or PCI-X).
For the most part, onboard stuff is the way to go these days. A lot of decent chipsets have dedicated chips for IDE/SATA processing, network/USB/various port processing, sound processing, etc. Not only that but most if not all of these components also have a dedicated bus to memory and the CPU which keeps all of the data off of the limited PCI bus.
Jam it back in, in the dark.
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Cetra