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Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) Bus Description

This bus is a replacement for the older ISA bus. The connectors for this bus are different than the ISA. The PCI bus connector has the edge traces closer together and is shorter in length then the ISA. Also usually the ISA bus connectors are brown in color where the PCI are many times white.

One of the nice feature of many PCI based motherboards is the ability to share IRQ lines. On those systems when you go into the Windows 95 system window and look at the device manager you will see several components having the same IRQ line. This is a big help for computers that have many devices connected. Typically IRQ9 is shared.

PCI cards should be Plug and Play (PnP) compatible when used in windows95 computers. Many motherboards will also detect these cards at boot time, if you have the PnP option turned on in the BIOS section.

PCI buses typically run at 33MHz and are designed to run as low as half the speed of the Memory Bus.

 

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