[wellylug] Network cards running at 10mb/s instead of 100 - w hy?

[Sam]

On Mon, 20 Oct 2003, Damon Lynch wrote:

> A machine of Pentium 233 vintage should have PCI slots good enough to
> handle 100mb/s, right?

The CPU speed doesn't affect the PCI speed - standard PCI is always going
to be 32 bits/33 mhz, giving just over 1 gigabit per second across the
whole bus.

Whether or not the CPU can cope with a fully saturated bus is another
question, but that would be a very rare occurrance.

The CPU requirements are going to come down more to the chipset of the
network card and the efficiency of the drivers.  But no, I don't imagine a
100mbit network connection causing any problems for a P233.