quick question

Hellrazer

Any one ever heard of/or used one of these "high speed serial port cards"?Any difference to modem speeds?


http://www.hardwarecentral.com/hardwarecentral/tutorials/57/1/

SickBoy

For an article dated Jul 19, 2002 I find this quote a little odd.

Installation is a snap. Plug the card into the slot, have Windows 95 detect it, and when prompted for the drivers, install them.

KdjaCL

better off buying a decent 56k modem like a Supramax Pro 56I***.
IN investment terms assuming DSL drops ,how much wil that card be worth to you then ?


***blatant shameless plug coming up
Like this modem
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&threadid=57616

hehe

But seriously i should never have bough that modem knowing i would be getting DSL.no point buying for the short term.

kdja

Hellrazer

Sickboy I do have a decent modem- usr external 56k voice fax modem.Connection speeds are excellent-well compared to the old winmodem I used to have.
Apparently this "card"I m talking about has an increased buffer size 64byte as opposed to 16byte with your normal serial port.This add-in card is basically gives you 2 more serial ports all be it with the above mentioned larger buffer and 16750 uart.
Its supposed to increase modem throught from your usual 115200 kps to almost 1mb per sec.
I ve seen these cards in Pc world for something like €25 or there abouts.As for the loss if DSL drops it wouldnt be that significant.
And as Im not prepared to pay eircom a fortune for outdated technologh(isdn) and DSL is still outside my budget I need a lower ping on games like RTCW(which Im addicted to at the moment)
And I was just wondering if anyone has ever tried them out.
Richie.

_CreeD_

Your phone line's bandwidth will limit you to 53kbps. The card may boost the theoretical bandwidth available between the pc and the modem (That your modem hasn't been built to take advantage of anyway), but that's not your bottleneck.
That article actually doesn't make a lot of sense. They state that the main reason for using one of these cards is to bypass any data bottlenecks between the PC and the external modem by providing greater bandwidth. They back this up by saying that even though the serial port can run at 115kbps, over twice as fast as your modem, that when compression comes into play that isn't enough. They have no numbers to back this claim up, and has anyone here ever consistently had 100%+ compression? (Even allowing a little overhead for protocols etc.). Also they state that the card will use an adjustable clock multiplier to step back down for older hardware, since your modem is built to work on a std. serial port then I think it's a safe bet that's what will happen. Next up is the claim that using a larger buffer will help, this will actually increase your latency, so in effect you're going to hamstring your online gaming.

It's a waste of money imho, for modems at least.

Hellrazer

Ok Creed thanks for the help .Il leave it until someday I have Dsl(mmmmmmmmm).
But what is the easiest way of lowering your ping/latency.Ive trawled the web and these boards and some say to use a small MTU others say large,Compression on /off.Very confusing altogether!!!!!!!!1
Richie