I have been told that getting a Gigabit LAN card that uses a PCI slot is a useless waste of money. Supposedly since the PCI uses a slower bus speed it is rendered useless. What are your thoughts on this?

i was under the impression that 1 gigabit card in the PCI slot is fine so long as your not trying to put other devices on the same PCI bus. I think a gigabit card will eat up 100% of the pci bus, and not take a hit to performance. You'll have to double check that, but i have seen many a system with a gigabit card in a pci slot.

Depends if the PCI bus is 33 or 66 I think? Check your mobo specs.

33 will bottleneck and 66 will be fine with a little headroom for 1 or 2 low use devices aswell...