Best PCI uses?

[whiteshadow_22]

Hey.

What would you say are some of the best gadgets for PCI ports, excluding soundcards and wireless network cards?

Another thing I was wondering is I guess PCIe 2.0 are just superfast PCI ports? I guess most stuff that uses them costs a bit more?

What would most people use them for? Wireless netword cards I guess?

Thanks for any help.

 

[pinaplex]

PCI and PCIe are two different technologies, and are not interoperable. so in short, PCIe isn't simply faster PCI.

PCI ports are there for legacy devices and many new soundcards, network cards, etc are not being made in PCI anymore.

Some legacy uses for PCI slots are modems, soundcards, network cards, and older controller cards.

 

[Sad Panda]

John Connor uses them to plug the neural chip of a terminator into the L.A. traffic system.

 

[whiteshadow_22]

I'll have to try doing that. Thanks. lol

 

[Outlander_04]

you can add usb or firewaire adapter cards. parallel ports , network cards, RAID controller cards , sound cards , really bad graphics cards ,modems , SCSI controllers



and a whole bunch of other crap thats useless to almost everyone with a motherboard manufactured after 1998 .

I switched to m-atx motherboards 5 years ago because there was never going to be anything worth plugging in to a pci slot ever again ......except my soundblaster

 

[whiteshadow_22]

Thanks outlander. Useful post.

Is firewire useful? What do most people use it for?

 

[Outlander_04]

most cases have firewire connectors on them . Mine has one on the front panel , and the motherboard has firewire header pins that its connected to.

But 5 years ago if you needed firewire the only way to add it was pci card .I have never used it , but some cameras nd video recorders used in when USB was slower. If you dont use it dont worry about it . Leave the case uncluttered and the air flow will be better

 

[Outlander_04]

Yeah the soundblaster, or yeah.....they make nice dust collectors.

wanna buy a slightly used dust collector ?

These days I use the onboard since I cant hear a difference, and the high def codec is better than ac 97 . And taking it out made room for a spanking big gfx card cooler

 

[whiteshadow_22]

Thanks for the help. I appreciate it.

 

[average joe]

It's a good place to put PCI cooling fans. For everything else use PCI Express if you can. I have an ancient PCI sound card which I kept moving to my new systems. One day I took it out and suddenly I can overclock much better and my system doesn't crash anymore. You'd think I would take my own advice. Did creative ever fix the EAX issues in Vista? I heard that their drivers don't use the hardware but run a software wrapper instead. That made me mad. I have a $100 space heater now.