How much will a PCI card restrict performance?

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Fenris_Ulf

[H]ard|Gawd
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Nov 29, 2004
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I'm looking to upgrade my HTPC video card. I just upgraded to Windows 7 and am having a ton of issues with the onboard video. The specs:

Albatron KI-690 mini-ITX mobo (AMD 690G/SB600) (yes it's old, if you want me to buy a newer one you can paypal me the money)
2 GB DDR2
BE-2300 CPU
Visio 42" TV

I have two main problems - when booting the HDMI signal doesn't sync with my TV unitl I'm in Windows. That's fine, but I have to have a standard monitor attached to the VGA port until Windows loads or else it will NEVER sync. I don't really want to keep a second monitor always attached, it's a PITA. The second issue is crackling on audio via HDMI. I know it's Win7's fault since it didn't do this in XP or Vista. AMD has stopped supporting this chipset, so I'm basically screwed for newer/better drivers. I'd rather not buy new mobo/ram/cpu, so I'm looking to upgrade with a new video card. The problem is that I only have a single PCI slot to use. The best PCI card I could find is a HIS 5450:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161353

Does anybody know how much the PCI bus will limit the capability of this card? I don't care about games with this box, my primary concern is Netflix, 1080p and Blu-Ray playback. The 690G and BE-230 is fully capable of every 1080p file I've thrown at it, but the driver issues with video sync and sound crackling on HDMI are becoming difficult to tolerate so I need to go with a Direct X 10+ card supported by Win7.
 
I don't think that card will really be restricted by the PCI bus for what you are doing.
 
If you were gaming with it, then it would restrict performance, but for what you doing it should work fine.
 
wow I am really amazed that you can still even get a PCI video card. Got any ISA slots? ;p
 
Devnull said:
wow I am really amazed that you can still even get a PCI video card. Got any ISA slots? ;p
Click to expand...

Acutally, I just threw away an old 440BX board with a 300A Celeron. Several ISA slots on that one. There's still a market for PCI cards - those who need lots of monitors, especially in a corporate environment. Almost every "business" PC is full of PCI and PCI-e x1 slots but has one or no x16 slots. If you're not gaming, you really don't need to push that much data across the bus, but PCI is still only 1/4 the bandwidth of PCI-e x1.
 
+1
Agreed

The pci bus isn't a problem if were not talking about video games.
and from what i can understand were talking about
primary concern is Netflix
Click to expand...
so its all good, the video card being on a pci bus isn't going to change anything.

Ps pci version 2.0+ = 266 MB\s of bandwith
 
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Good catch. I learned waaaaaay back in the day that PCI was 33MHz x 32 bits giving 133MB/s. I forgot that it improved in 2.0 to 66MHz. Since almost no modern peripherals that are bandwidth intensive use PCI, I really haven't thought about bandwidth. Yes, some RAID and Gig-E cards do but they're shifting/shifted to PCI-X for servers and PCI-e for desktops/servers. Most consumer products are built-in to the motherboards. Even add in sound cards and TV tuners are shifting to PCI-e.

266 MB/s should be enough, especially with on-board video processing. The only decent review was on bjorn3d and it seemed to work well enough for them, although they had a lot more processor power behind it. Plus it will be nice to get 256mb of memory back from the onboard video. Maybe I can talk the wife into letting me buy a small SSD to go with it.
 
I'm pretty sure benching an HD5870 or something like it on PCIe 1x (500MB/s at most) only halved its performance. Running a basic card on PCI will not harm it.
 
With the 5450, you can offload the 1080p decoding to it. Less strain on your cpu.
 
IIRC 66/133mhz PCI buses, like PCI-X slots never showed up on consumer level boards because they were more expensive and there was a lack of hardware that needed the speed.
 
+1
Agreed
Way to expensive &

Micro rant :D
PCI-X or should i say 64bit pci like 16bit ISA are backward compatible.

Meaning you can put a 8bit IAS card in a 16bit slot, or a 32bit PCI card in a 64bit pci slot.
though in this case sometimes it doesn't work out because some PCI\PCI-X slots only support 3.3v cards or 5V cards,besides that newer versions of PCI or PCI-X should be backwards compatible in a perfect world but at times are not for piles of different reasons.

PCI-X\ PCI \ ISA\ VL-bus are all so analog signals and require piles of mother bored traces to make them work.
And like most things that play around on the analog signal topic, they are greatly affected by any kind of electromagnetic interference.

Digital signals require hardly any motherboard traces and are not affected the same way by most of the problems of analog signals and or electromagnetism, and this was one of the main reasons why the move was made to pci-e as well as more overall bandwidth and dedicated bandwidth to the chipset.

You should note as well that some motherboards~chipsets back in the day had more then one pci bus internally, meaning slots 1\2 are on one bus and slots 3\4\5 are on a different one.
plz refer to your chipset white paper block diagram for more info.:)

None the less even back in the AGP 4x vs 8x years as we all know their wasn't really a lot of performance to be gained or lost on this topic and last i checked its the same old same old story on the pci-e 8x vs 16x topic if were talking about video cards.

PCI 32bit 66MHz is different though and is on par with AGP version 1.0 {AGP 1x =266MB\s} so you will take a performance hit but really its all a mater of what your trying to do with your video card and in this case i don't see the problem for just watching *.AVI and the like.

My self the last big card i had for pci on the video card topic was a asus mx400 32meg sdr, and it worked out just fine back in the day on my AMD k62 500mgz computer,i ended up selling the video card used one year later for like $100.
Pci video cards back then were a hot topic seeing as many motherboards at the time lacked a agp slot but could still be P3 1000mgz computer.
Like dell computers for office work with only one or two pci slots and no agp.:)

And last but not lest on the pci topic in this day and age,most if not all of the important options for pci are no longer seen in the computer bios settings sadly {insert disrespectful comment here}, and this makes it a real bitch to fine tune pci card at times, as well windows for some time now lacks the ability to change IRQ\DMA\input~output ranges\memory addressee use\etc {insert disrespectful micro$oft comment here}, as well as many of the options needed to fine tune PCI-X\ PCI \ ISA\ VL-bus.

And even to this day i don't like my video card and or other hardware sharing the same IRQ depending on what the hardware is in question, but sadly theirs not a god dam thing i can do about it as far as the hardware abstraction layer is concerned {insert disrespectful micro$oft comment here}

Be shore as well not to put a PCI 33mgz card in a PCI 66mgz slot on the same internal PCI bus as a 66MHz device seeing as the hole bus will snap back in to 33mgz compatibility mode.
 
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WarZone, i don't mean to get all anal on you, but PCI and ISA are 100% digital, not analog. They're a more parallel type of bus rather than a serial connection like PCI-e. The parallel connection needs data synchronization as well as many more traces. This is an important factor in bridge chip pin count and motherboard real estate. As processes improved and greater speeds were available, faster serial connections became more practical. PCI-e allows multiple serial connections to be paralleled in order to give the best of both worlds.

Anyway, the cost of the PCI card is $95. The cost of a new Zacate board is $109 (when they come back in stock, plus $20 in RAM). For half the power usage, basically equivalent GPUs, double the memory and good enough CPU power, the Zacate is a no-brainer upgrade. I'll make that difference up in a year in electricity and A/C costs. A SSD would be the perfect accompanyment - I just have to talk the wife into it now.
 
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