Wanted: a quality usb pci card with good performance
 

After learning some gigabit network cards do not perform as well as others, and drastically so on old hardware such as my Celeron at 533 MHz, I wonder: is the same is true of USB 2 PCI cards?

What are some quality USB 2 PCI cards, performing as fast as possible?

Does it matter if the spec says PCI-X/PCI instead of just PCI? Target hardware is PCI.

Hi there,

with a PC that old, the apparently bad performance of a fast NIC or USB adapter may not even be the bottleneck. I could imagine it's the whole system consisting of CPU, RAM and harddisk that is operating at its limits with the speed that for example a Gigabit ethernet card could do. I'm surprised, however, that you claim to notice a significant difference in performance among different cards.

Based on that assumption, I'm afraid that would also apply to USB - and the impact may be much more noticeable, because with a USB port, the CPU has to supply (or fetch) the data byte by byte, which causes heavy CPU load, while a network adapter operates blockwise, typically about 1500 bytes at once. Just to give you an impression: Some time ago, I ran a small box with a 600MHz VIA C3 Eden CPU. Transferring data to or from an external hard disk caused about 30..50% CPU load on that machine!

Actually, I've never used add-on USB cards - the onboard USB ports have always been sufficient for what I needed.

You're thinking of PCI-e, sometimes written PCIe or PCI-E? - That's a very different thing. It's short for PCI Express which is basically an advanced variant of PCI using serial data transfer between the host and the add-on card. From a programmer's view, PCI-e is largely backwards compatible to traditional PCI, but from a hardware point of view it's very different, though the connector it uses looks pretty similar to PCI.
PCI-e comes in various flavors like PCI-e x1 or PCI-e x16, the number indicating the number of simultaneous serial transfers (channels). Graphics adapters needing a high throughput usually come as x16, NICs and USB card usually as x1. I'v occasionally seen the intermediate variant x4, but that seems pretty rare.

So for your old system, you definitely need plain normal PCI - no PCI Express or other fancy names.

[X] Doc CPU

Thanks. I was talking about PCI-X, not PCI-e.

By the way, does a PCI-e card exist that also works in a PCI socket?

Hi there,

sorry, I thought the X was a placeholder for just anything. I've never heard or read of PCI-X.

No. Technically impossible.

[X] Doc CPU

I'd agree that something like a gig nic would far outperform the pci backplane and hard drives. Yes, enterprise level nics tend to perform much faster than or use less cpu than common parts.

I'd suspect that you could use any good quality usb pci card and it should handle usb 2.0 speeds. It may say the backplane speed but usually they won't advertise that.


Notes.
Pci-x was a very short lived server slot that was generally green. It was a multi function pci slot. It was quickly replaced by pci-e. One can place a pci card in and it will operate at any of the pci speeds. A pci-x would go up to (I forget) 100mhz or so??

No specific brand recommendations?

The only way I can tell quality is by the price they charge on ebay. Can't we do better than that?

There are a hand full of pci cards on this page.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...642&Submit=ENE

I have a AMD Processor so I decided it was wise to stick with a Radeon PCI-e graphics card.

A lot of folks like Nvidia. Newegg is a little high on some of their hardware but I have never had an issue with Nvidia, Radeon or MSI merchandise. **Keep your receipt you may be able to get a rebate**

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16833114006

I installed this wireless 802.11b pci card and it works great!
http://www.microcenter.com/product/3...chable_Antenna

Hi there,

thank you for that information. I actually didn't know about that before. - So it's unlikely to find PCI-X in an ordinary desktop PC.

No, because in the IT world, the brand name tells you more or less who trades the product, but hardly ever who makes it (unless you're talking about elementary components like processors or memory chips).

Not a good approach. In the consumer market, price has never been an indicator for quality. That's because there are countless retailers who sell "cheap" crap labeled with fantasy brand names at sky high prices. Usually specialist stores (often mail order stores) charge less money for a valuable product than a retail store would for neatly wrapped junk. And ebay is yet different: Here the price depends on how many people want to have the item and how badly. Quality hardly matters.

What really matters is technical features and specs. In your particular case that might be:

• must fit in a standard PCI slot
• number of USB ports: Some have two, some have four
• can it use DMA? That would reduce the CPU load considerably

I hope we can.

[X] Doc CPU

The network cars can make a big difference with older, slower machines. A some (better) network cards will have proper netowrk hardware, and things like TOE (TCP offload engine). 'Bad' cards can have software/CPU controlled 'non-real' network hardware, which can really impact older, slower machines.

Sure, a circa 2000 HDD isnt going to keep up with gigabit.

Circa 2000 HDD- 15-45MB/sec
Ethernet- 12.5MB/sec (theoretical maximum)
Gigabit netowrking- 125MB/sec (theoretical maximum)
PCI- 133MB/sec (33MHz/32-bit, theoretical maximum)

In most cases, gigabit wont get to max speed on such an old machine, but it will get much better speeds than ethernet. But if the files you want to transfer are cached you should be able to get somewhere near the theoretical maximum.

As far as I know you're right about the CPU use in USB.

I dont ever recall seeing CPU use statictics on hardware reviews for USB controllers, and I'd guess there isnt a huge amount of difference between most USB controller cards.

PCI-X is quite different to PCIe.

PCI-X is often backward compatible with PCI, in some cases you can run a PCI-X card in a PCI slot, but there will be a performance impact.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI-X

Brand matters less than most people think. It generally doesnt matter if the card has been assembled/branded 'quality' (e.g. asus) or if its some 'budget' brand (e.g. startech), what matters is the controller chip. If a $35 asus card has the same controller as a $12 startech card, they will run pretty much the same.

With motherbaords I suggest getting some quality, troubleshooting and replacing motherobards is slow and can be expensive. For a poxy network card, or a USB card, its a 5 minutes or less job to replace (I can do it in under 60 seconds), so spending a lot more isnt really worth it IMO.

Most of the USB 2.0 cards I see use VIA chipsets. No idea if they vary the chips/revisions from manufacturer to manufacturer. Sorry that I dont know that offhand, and I dont have the time to figure it out now....

This one claims "4 DMA engines with pipelined control for data transfer". Would you call it a quality one?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Astrotek-4-1...-/271459279562

By the way, how it works in windows is important too. What is the windows equivalent to this outstanding forum? I do have some windows specific questions about hardware. What about Tom's hardware?

"unlikely to find PCI-X in an ordinary desktop PC." About a zero chance. Only used in servers. They tended to have raid chips attached to the PCI-X bus.

I don't buy from ebay.

Are you trying to say you do not believe what many say in ebay?

What about the following one from the manufacturer's site that mentions 4 DMA engines too, it says "4 DMA engines with pipelined control for USB data transfer bandwidth improvement":

http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/pe...ls/usb/vt6212/

I think the next step definitely is, where do you buy a usb pci card with the above VT6212 chipset?

They do sell usb 3.0 on pci. Not sure back plane will support those speeds.

I'm pretty sure that pretty much all USB 2.0 controllers will use DMA if possible, its not some outstanding feature. Its just another VIA VT6212 controller. There will be no major differences between the VIA VT6212 controllers no matter what brand they are. They work, but arent that great, even on release (2004!) they were outclassed by USB 2.0 controllers in chipsets-

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/sto...ay/vt6212.html

From what I remember, the NEC USB 2.0 controllers were much better regarded than the VIA controllers, the VIA ones were more likely to have issues, and IIRC were slower as well. But I cant be sure about any differences in CPU use.

While rare, there are 'desktop' boards with PCI-X slots, e.g. Asus M2N32 WS Professional-

http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/M2N32_WS_Professional/

It wont on PCI. PCI = 133MB/sec max. USB 3.0 = 625MB/sec max (not that you'll get that speed ever)