[time-nuts] Re: Ryzen mobos with serial port for Garmin GPS?

[Bob kb8tq]

Hi

I would suggest that this is a very unusual way to do a serial card. There are
a lot of PCIe cards out there that go straight to the bus. Amazon is awash in them.
If you stick with the 1 or 2 port versions, you should not get anything to weird. 

Bob

> On Nov 5, 2021, at 10:14 PM, Rich Wales <richw at richw.org> wrote:
> 
> Angus wrote:
>> /What timing issues did you have? I've used a similar setup on two old windows machines (one XP and one Win10) and I didn't see much difference between the built in serial port and the ones on the PCI serial cards. They were not PCIe./
> 
> The serial card I used (with unpredictable PPS signal timing) was a PCIe card.  But I think the more significant difference was that this PCIe serial card was really a USB card with a serial-to-USB front end, and this protocol conversion was the reason for the extra jitter.
> 
> Old PCI serial cards came from a time before USB was common (or even existed), and they sent the serial data directly to the PCI bus without going through any intermediate steps.  If we could find PCI or PCIe serial cards which worked in this same way, we would presumably have the same high performance as in the old days. However, there is very little incentive nowadays for hardware manufacturers to do this; the few serial cards that are still made today (after all, who really needs, wants, or even knows about RS232 anymore?) generally cut corners by slapping a cheap serial-to-USB front end onto a cheap USB card, and except for those of us who really need accurate timing, none of their customers are likely to care or even notice.
> 
> *Rich Wales*
> richw at richw.org
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