On 12/6/05, Lee Sharp <leesharp at hal dash pc dot org> wrote:
>
> Keep in mind that CPU is only part of the picture.  Buss speed plays a major
> roll here.  Try and have your high demand cards in separate bussmastering
> slots.  Have a high speed buss, at the expense of a lower speed chip.
>

Yeah, but the two go hand in hand for the most part.  A Celeron 433,
or P3, has a much more capable bus than the old P166 he was using. 
And either/or is sufficient if all you need is 100 Mb wire speed. 
That's 200 Mbps through the PCI bus, or 25 MBps, of 133 MBps max PCI
bus speed (about 18% of max, plenty of room to spare).

If we were talking about 5+ 100 Mb NIC's, or gig NIC's, this would be
a completely different story.  At this scale, bus speed isn't much of
a factor once you get into the P3 range.

-Chris