16 Aug
2010
16 Aug
'10
9:19 a.m.
Niels Mayer wrote:
On Sun, Aug 15, 2010 at 11:21 PM, Clemens Ladisch
<clemens(a)ladisch.de> wrote:
Yes. No.
These adapters are useful only if you need some
features of a PCI card
and if your mainboard has already run out of free PCI slots.
Hopefully "all features" of the PCI card would be available, right?
There wouldn't be any bus-mastering issues, etc? Would there be any additional issues with combining
multiple ice1712
cards where some might be on PCI and some on converted PCI-e? Cards
like Terratec EWS88 or M-Audio Delta claim to share interrupts when
multiple cards of the same type are installed. I would imagine in a
PCIe slot that might not be the case?
You'd have multiple independent PCI buses. However, those interrupts
still must be mapped to some of the interrupt controller's interrupts.
This mapping is probably different, but there might be more or less
sharing.
Also, the "literature" from the URLs posted
earlier states:
////////////////
Technical benefit: A card in the PCIe slot gets the full dedicated PCI
bandwidth, one of the key benefits of the PCIe Point-to-Point
infrastructure. This contrasts with a traditional PCI bus system
where the card would have to share the resources with cards in the
other slots, and any on-board PCI controllers, such as SATA adaptors
or Gigabit Ethernet, which can be quite bandwidth hungry.
////////////////
This is true.
Seems like this could be an interesting solution for
those suffering
from graphics-card bus-contention with their soundcard.
From what I've heard, the problem with graphic
cards is not memory
bandwidth but CPU-hogging drivers.
The ultimate variation of the "move soundcard to
a different
PCI slot" solution, I guess :-) .
You still get a different interrupt if you put a card into a different
PCIe slot.
Regards,
Clemens