hardware upgrade worth while?

[French-Guy]

The link works for me.......Maybe because of he location? I'm in the US

 

I've found this on ebay:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/ATI-R92P-29-8330-Ver-1-RADEON-9200-256MB-PCI-VIDEO-Graphics-CARD-DVI-S-VIDEO-VGA/332493409857?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&_trksid=p2060353.m1438.l2649

[NewDisplayName]

ah, so you mean pci instead of pcie slot. Good idea.

Edited December 20, 2017 by nuhll

[French-Guy]

Yes, i want a basic PCI vga board to free up all my PCIe slots (4 total)

[French-Guy]

I found a cheap PCI video card on eBay ($8).....ATI Radeon 9200 256MB

Right now, I have a PCI gigabit ethernet card (something I purchased a long time ago when the onboard nic died)

Is it going to be a bottle neck ? Should I replace it by a PCI-e ethernet board? If yes, I don't want to pay too much (I know everyone is talking about Intel NIC, but they are expensive)

Which board/chip would be a decent choice, for cheap?

[tdallen]

The PCI Ethernet card could be a slight bottleneck at maximum loads, but personally I’d give it a try.  It’s silly to spend money on that old system trying to eeek every ounce of performance out of it.  PCI maxes at 133 MB/s and that’s shared.  That’s enough to support 1 Gbps most of the time, if the video card isn’t active.  A PCIe x1 Ethernet card won’t be bus bandwidth limited at 1 Gbps and you *might* notice when copying large video files across the network to your server -  but this is 2018 not 2008.  I’d spend the absolute minimum to get one of these old boxes running reasonably well (and I suspect it would run reasonably well with the PCI NIC) and then start setting aside your money for a new, modern system.  If you notice a big hit from the PCI Ethernet card, then see if you can find a PCIe x1 for cheap.

[NewDisplayName]

Yeah, i guess 133mb is more then ur drives can handle, so it should be fine.

[French-Guy]

1 hour ago, tdallen said:

The PCI Ethernet card could be a slight bottleneck at maximum loads, but personally I’d give it a try.  It’s silly to spend money on that old system trying to eeek every ounce of performance out of it.  PCI maxes at 133 MB/s and that’s shared.  That’s enough to support 1 Gbps most of the time, if the video card isn’t active.  A PCIe x1 Ethernet card won’t be bus bandwidth limited at 1 Gbps and you *might* notice when copying large video files across the network to your server -  but this is 2018 not 2008.  I’d spend the absolute minimum to get one of these old boxes running reasonably well (and I suspect it would run reasonably well with the PCI NIC) and then start setting aside your money for a new, modern system.  If you notice a big hit from the PCI Ethernet card, then see if you can find a PCIe x1 for cheap.

I know.....so far, I'm at $8 for this "old"rig for the video card. But I will go from a 415 passmark  CPU to 1750, and from 2GB to 8GB

But I agree, I'm not planning to put more $$ on this...If I were to want a better NIC card (PCIe), I will see if the IT guy from my company can get one for me ....for free !!!!

[tdallen]

Well if there's a free option - since since your SATA card will be max of x8, you should have PCIe lanes to spare for an Ethernet card.