I have upgraded to broadband and now my PCI 56K modem sits idle. My dad still uses AOL 56k to receive his emails. However I have a spare USB modem which is of a similar spec. I wondered if when I freed up a spare internal PCI slot to make room for a TV card, etc; how much slower will the USB modem be compared to PCI?

PC Spec: AMD Athlon XP 2000+ running at 1.25ghz, ECS K7S5A Motherboard, 768MB SDRAM PC133, Sparkle nVidia Riva TNT2 M64 32MB AGP Graphics Card, Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 6.1, Windows Me

The modem runs at 56K. The USB runs at something like 1M even for the USB 1.0. So the USB will be idle waiting for the modem to do its work most of the time. Bottom line: the modem will not run any slower.

USB will not be the bottleneck. You connection will not be any slow but USB uses more resource than PCI.

How many more resources do USB Modems use, how much of a performance decrease will I notice and when will the decrease occur? I need to free up some PCI Slots for a 10/100 NIC Card, TV Card and a PCI Card full of USB 2.0 Ports.

PC Spec: AMD Athlon XP 2000+ running at 1.25ghz, ECS K7S5A Motherboard, 768MB SDRAM PC133, Sparkle nVidia Riva TNT2 M64 32MB AGP Graphics Card, Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 6.1, Windows Me<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by marshahu on 03/19/04 07:42 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

The USB external modem will actually use up less resources than the pci internal modem, at least in terms of processor resources.

Internal modems use the operatin software to handle incomming and outgoing data processes that external modems have UART hardware included for.

It has been my experience that even internal modems that state they inlude the UART hardware still use more processor resources than external modems.

However with the speed of the new processes its hardly relevant. The advantage is then having more info on what an external modem is doing.

Preformance doesnt matter either cause its only going to be used for your dad to download email, everything else you would be using the broadband for.

All the reasons above however are irrelevant as u need pci slots anyway.

"" Society is to blame ""

I thought that USB modems still used your main processor to do their work? I know that external modems with a serial interface dont, but surely even if the modem did its own processing the amount of processing power required to simply drive USB is more than a software internal modem?

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USB modems, as with all external modems, contain all the hardware to carry out the required data transmission processes. Thus relieving the cpu of the task.

The resources used in controling the USB port is not that different from the resources required in controlling PCI slots, or any of the other ports on the computer. All information from the modem is still transmitted along the pci bus.

Its a fairly large over simplification, if you really want to get into it, check out www.usb.org

"" Society is to blame ""