• Upgrading home network from 100mbps to 1gbps what card type should I get?
    4 replies, posted
Will there be a difference between using a PCI 1gbps card and a PCIe 1x 1gbps card?
There will be a difference. PCI is a parallel drop bus with a maximum bandwidth of 133 MB/s, which is shared between all devices on the bus. A gigabit card can do 125 MB/s peak, which will almost completely saturate the PCI bus and be bottlenecked. A PCIe 1x slot is at minimum a 250 MB/s serial link directly to the chipset and doesn't have to share bandwidth with other devices, it will be much faster.
If you don't mind me asking, how old of a mobo are you using? most of them, even some from a few years back, already have integrated gigabit ports.
It's an asrock N68C-S UCC, it only has 100mbps.
Sorry for bumping this (assuming I don't get auto-merged) but I forgot to mention the only reason I'm doing this is in the future I should be getting 100mbps internet (currently 16mbps), and I'd like to have sufficient overhead and to avoid congestion on the local network (i.e, streaming a video to my ps3 from my pc). I won't be using the full 1gbps bandwidth. I have only 1 available PCI slot (the other is unusable as my gpu covers it) so I don't think power would be problem, and If possible I'd really like to keep my PCI-E 1x slot free incase I decided to buy a USB 3 card or such.
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