Understanding Bandwidth and Latency
M. Woodrow, Jr. writes "Ars has a very eye-opening article on the real causes of bandwidth latency and why we should just drool endlessly over maximum throughput issues. In particular, I think the author's look into the PowerPC 970 and the P4's frontside bus is interesting considering how we're constantly being told by marketers that more speed is always going to translate into massive performance gains. The issue is, of course, far more complex, and this article does a good job of thinking about the problem from an almost platform agnostic point of view."
Yes, while the theoretical rate is much faster than PCI (as you noted), I believe that these cards are designed for 64-bit PCI slots, which you can see by the chart (which only lists fast/wide PCI) is 4x faster. A standard 64-bit slot running at 33 mhz (the speed at which most 32-bit slots run) is twice as fast as standard PCI.
;)
So actually, Ultra-320 SCSI is the shit.