asterisk users - Aug 2008 - seeking hardware recommendation PCI versus PCI Express E1 card (te407p vs te420bf)

Dear List ,

I have to make a choice between TE407P  (5.0V PCI slot) and TE420BF (3.3V PCI
express).

I have a IBM x220 with 2 x 1.2 GHz PIII CPU and OnBoard SCSI Ultra160 Drives
but it does not have PCI Express slot. So i cannot use TE420BF with it.

The system i am willing to build should support upto 60 voice channels
and there will be at least 10 channels under call recording.

My question is will the CPU power (2 * 1200 MHz PIII ) and the PCI bus (33 MHz
bus)
be sufficient to handle the load ?

I can always buy the card  and test , and if the need be i can put the
card (TE407P) on the 5 V PCI slot of any modern motherboard also, the
question here is , Am i loosing anything by not buying a PCI-Express card
and instead going for a normal 33MHz , 5.0 V PCI card ?

to summarise is TE407P in anyway inferior to TE420BF Card ?
does TE407P saturate the 33mhz PCI bus when all voice channels are used ?

The most new mobos are having 5.0V PCI slots , PCI x1 and x16 slots, so
if i buy te407p i test it with the old ibm x220 server and if need be
i can use it with the newer mobos.

regds
Rajesh Kumar Mallah.

Rajesh Kumar Mallah wrote:
> to summarise is TE407P in anyway inferior to TE420BF Card ?
> does TE407P saturate the 33mhz PCI bus when all voice channels are used ?
There is no effective performance difference between using the PCI-X and
PCI-E versions of these cards; the cards are essentially identical, with
the addition of a PCI-Express bridge on the PCI-E card.

Keep in mind that even if you use 4 E1 circuits with the card, the total
bandwidth consumption of card is approximately 1 megabyte per second (4
times 2 megabits per second), which is drastically below the PCI bus
bandwidth of 132 megabytes per second (33 MHz bus with 32-bit
transfers). No quad-T1/E1 card will ever be able to saturate a PCI bus,
especially not PCI-X or PCI-E.

-- 
Kevin P. Fleming
Director of Software Technologies
Digium, Inc. - "The Genuine Asterisk Experience" (TM)