On Thu, 01 Aug 2002 13:50:07 -0500 Chris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Pardon my ignorance but in a conversation a while ago someone asked > this listserve if upgrading to 100mbs ethernet on an older PCI > powermac lab would be worth it to improve terminal performance. > > Most people seemed to say 'NO' because of the limits of the PCI bus.
100Mbps Ethernet = approx. 10-12 MB/s. PCI bandwidth is 132 MB/s (or 80-90 MB/s in practice, I've read here recently). Plenty of headroom. I doubt such a card would even get much in the way of other PCI traffic. In short, the answer is 'YES', a faster Ethernet interface will improve performance. > -what is the speed of the PCI bus on an older powermac? (is is 50% > bus speed?) As Ben said, it is 33 MHz. It has no relation to the system bus speed, and remains the same even if you overclock the system bus. > -What about the onboard video and ethernet? Is that effected > performance wise by the increased bus speed? Video possibly, but keep in mind that on-board Ethernet is only 10Mbps, which is only about 1 MB/s throughput at the best of times, hardly a significant load on the system bus. > -Should I worry about old PCI cards not working at "overclocked" PCI > bus settings on the PPC-MAC side? No, because you can't change the PCI clock. -- Michael
