Network cards???

Catz420 · July 15, 2016

Does a PCI wireless card work better than a USB one? Or is it the other way around?

Skiiwee29 · July 15, 2016

2 minutes ago, Catz420 said:

Does a PCI wireless card work better than a USB one? Or is it the other way around?

Yes, internal will always work better in my experience. Much better power delivery and more stable.

mariushm · July 15, 2016

Yes, an internal pci express card will have slightly less latency and less CPU usage. In real world, these differences are usually small enough that most common computer users won't be bothered by them. If you're afraid of opening the computer or maybe it's sealed (for warranty purposes) there's nothing wrong with going with an usb wireless card.

A pci express card has access to a very fast data bus that is connected directly to the processor and the memory, so the incoming data from the network/internet can be quickly transferred to the system's memory from where user or applications have access to it.

A usb network card has to receive the data (well, small pieces of the data), encode it in a way that makes it possible to be sent through the two data wires in the usb connector and then the usb driver in your computer has to decode this data back to how a normal pci express network card would put it in memory for various applications. Therefore, there's an extra layer involved with usb cards, invisible to users but still consuming a very tiny amount of processor time to do those conversions in real time.

(i'm over simplifying this, so simplified that it may be wrong in a way but just go with it) : In addition, unlike pci express, a device on usb can not initiate communication with the computer, the usb driver has to ask "do you want to give me some data?" and then the usb device can send a packet of data and say "i have more of this, I'll continue to send packets of data". This is very convenient for devices like keyboards for example, where user may not press a key for seconds at a time - the usb driver can just ask "did the user press a key?" about 125 times a second and the keyboard can say "no" or "yes, user pressed this many keys, here's the key codes in this sequence: " It saves power and processor time.

By design, the usb driver is not allowed to ask a device if it has something to send to the computer more than 1000 times a second (1000 Hz polling rate) so in theory, in the worst case scenario. up to 1 millisecond can elapse from the moment the network card receives some data and the computer actually receives it and is able to use it, and this can be noticeable if you're into competitive gaming (cs:go and stuff like that)