Find the Newest Bus and Use It Well

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Find the Newest Bus and Use It Well!

If your computer is a desktop or server PC, you must match its NIC (or NICs) to an internal bus (or buses) with an open slot (or slots). In this section, we introduce information about a variety of buses that you may find in your PCs, and we offer tips about which ones are better than others.

Tip 

Because Windows Server 2003's primary job is handling network service requests , install the fastest , most capable NIC(s) that works on your PC. Then you can expect the best possible performance for your network clients !

The business end of a NIC plugs into a PC bus and is called an edge connector . You can recognize the types of interfaces that your computer includes by looking at a computer's bus slots. Likewise, looking at your NIC can tell you for which type of bus it's made. Figure 6-2 shows the three types of buses covered in this section ISA, EISA, and PCI with their respective edge connectors.

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Figure 6-2: PC buses and their connectors are made to match up perfectly .

NICs come in a variety of flavors that generally correspond to PC bus architectures that have found their way in and out of vogue since the 1980s. Here's a brief list of these architectures:

  • Industry Standard Architecture (ISA): ISA is pronounced "ice-ah" and describes the bus that most PCs have used since IBM introduced the PC/AT in 1985. ISA is still a common PC bus, but you should use a faster bus type, such as PCI, for better Windows Server 2003 performance.

  • Extended ISA (EISA): EISA is pronounced "eesa." This type of bus is fairly difficult to find today. It represented an attempt to extend the capabilities of the ISA bus. EISA is backward compatible with ISA, which means that you can plug an ISA card into an EISA slot and it will work even though EISA and ISA cards use slightly different edge connectors (refer to Figure 6-2). Although EISA cards provide better performance than ISA cards and were designed specifically for servers, EISA never really caught on.

  • Micro Channel Architecture (MCA): MCA is a 32-bit bus developed by IBM, with most of the same advantages as EISA: higher speed and a broader, 32-bit data path . If you have a Micro Channel PC, you must buy Micro Channel NICs to go with it because MCA is a replacement bus, not necessarily an expansion bus. MCA's main advantage is that you can usually plug in a NIC and it handles its own configuration. This convenience does not come cheap, however MCA NICs cost more than other NICs. MCA buses are rare today except in high-end IBM machines such as Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) workstations or AS/400s.

  • VESA Local Bus (VLB): VESA stands for Video Electronics Standards Association . VLB is a 32-bit bus technology that runs at speeds up to 66 MHz. A VLB slot uses one 32-bit MCA slot plus another standard ISA, EISA, or MCA slot. This lets manufacturers design NICs that use the local bus or the standard bus at the same time. VLB supports a bus management technique known as bus mastering , which enables the board to take control of the bus and frees the CPU to handle other tasks , thereby speeding up overall system performance. Because VLB depends on MCA, VLB is pretty much pass. You'll be hard pressed to find a new system with VLB.

  • Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI): The PCI, developed by Intel, provides a high-speed data path between the CPU and up to ten peripherals while coexisting with ISA or EISA (like other expansion buses). Like VLB, PCI supports bus mastering to free up the CPU. With PCI, you plug ISA or EISA boards into their usual slots, and plug high-speed PCI controllers into PCI slots. PCI supports 32- and 64-bit implementations , with clock speeds up to 100 MHz and data transfer rates up to 132 Mbps. It's no wonder that PCI has more or less won the bus wars and that it has become the high-speed local PC bus of choice. PCI offers the best performance for peripheral adapter cards, and when it comes to server NICs, that's the name of the game!

High-speed buses such as EISA and PCI are great, and emerging standards such as FireWire (which is Apple's implementation of IEEE 1394) and Fibre Channel are even better because high-speed buses meet a server's need for speed in spades. On the other hand, you may not always have the money or open slots to use a high-speed connection, so do the best you can.

Tip 

For more information on the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) 1394 standard, search your favorite Web browser using the keywords IEEE 1394 or search the IEEE Web site at http://www.ieee.org.

Because Windows 2003 supports FireWire and Fibre Channel, high-speed options for networking are broader than for any other Windows server versions. However, we still feel that PCI is the best game in town when it comes to providing high performance and advanced features because it's widely available and supported in Windows 2003. In addition, many vendors offer PCI-based NICs with advanced features suitable for use on Windows Server 2003.

FireWire and Fibre Channel may become better options in the future, but for now, the competition out there in the marketplace is not yet fierce enough to bring prices down from their stratospheric levels. That's why we recommend obtaining the fastest available PCI NIC for your network technology of choice: You can use PCI to make your Windows Server 2003 as fast at networking as it can be, which is highly desirable on a network server of any kind.

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Windows Server 2003 for Dummies
Windows Server 2003 for Dummies
ISBN: 0764516337
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 195

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