I845 Motherboard with ISA

[HBullock]

Hi, I work in the industrial Sector and there has been a steady increase in the use of PC's as Operator control stations. This move from Proprietary hardware based OIT's has not kept pace with the PC market. In this I mean that the latest industrial release is usually a full generation back. Case in point is our Honeywell GUS (Global User Stations) Stations that utilize Dell GX200 computers with P3-1GHz processors. Now if any of you are familiar with the world of industrial supply you'll know that if you sell it to an industrial customer it is typically 3 times the price. What we have done at our site is purchase seperately the components to build our own pc based stations. We used an MSI motherboard with the I845 chipset and other standard off the shelf components. The one underlying necessity was to have a board with an ISA slot. I know who would use one in this day and age. Well besides being a generation back many of these industrial suppliers have proprietary boards they supply to make things like custom operator keyboards and touch screens work. So my long winded question is this. Does the use of the ISA slot adversely affect the speed or performance of the overall system? We have upgraded a couple of our stations and they work great.

Thanks,

harry.


All Spelling and Gramatical errors are on purpose for testing the readers abilities.

 

[jlanka]

Does the use of the ISA slot adversely affect the speed or performance of the overall system?

I would say no. The ISA device will not noticeably affect the system when it is not being used. When it is being used, the CPU will wait for the interrupts to come on from the ISA bus the same as the PCI bus. It is plenty fast to handle anything that comes its way (CPU). The only thing I can think of that may be a factor is if you're doing a ton of writing to the ISA device, but I still think that due to the time quantums allowed each process in the time sharing algorithms used by the OS you'll be fine.

Just a guess mind you. But a fairly educated one.

<i>It's always the one thing you never suspected.</i>