Hi there, I bought a shiny new desktop machine that doesn't have a wireless card! I was about to order a PCI card but then I saw my motherboard would accept a PCI-E card at x1 and x16. Googling around it toolk like PCI-E cards are better for video data but are they also good for wireless networking? I want to get the best card for my machine (networking is a must!) so which should it be? PCI? PCI-E x1? or PCI-E x16?

Wireless network cards for laptops are usually a lot more pricey than their counterparts for PC's. I would suspect that a PCIe NIC for a laptop would be more expensive than a normal PCI card for the same laptop. If it were me, I'd do some price comparing between the two and go with the less expensive option. Truth be told, you won't actually "see" a difference between PCI and PCIE with regard to network speed. A 1000 Mbps PCI card is every bit as fast as 1000 Mbps PCIe card and vice versa.

Thanks Curt for your quick reply. Just to clarify - my machine is a desktop and not a laptop. I understand from your message that there is no networking advantage to getting a PCI-E card over and above a PCI card so I'll probably go with the latter! Are there any other features to a PCI-E card that make it an attractive buy?

Not that I can think of. Any features you could find on a PCIe network card would also be available on a PCI card I'm sure.