You misunderstood. I meant real PCI-X, the old PCI eXtended, PCI-X - Wikipedia … a few of these cards have proven to have legendary standards compliance and reliability… things like not resetting the server with bus errors - ever.
That said, it is interesting that some PCI-E WiFi devices are also having this problem. I wonder if this applies to Intel PCI-E WiFi devices as well.
Indeed. Even MacOSX and Linux, even RTLinux, are going to have problems with this. Standard recommendation for EMC2 software (which actually controls CNC stepper motor drivers directly with RTLinux through a parallel port) is that the computer should not be busy doing other things. Like graphics rendering.
I don’t think pitool should be interfacing with hardware without having a device plugged in.
Perhaps not. But it could be MSW doing something funny whenever certain drivers are loaded, causing weird wakeups from some power management state. This isn’t CS if you mean Computer Science of course, we’re talking MSW and weird network ‘hardware’ here, so maybe Computer Silliness 
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makes me wonder if usb 3.0 would’ve helped
Probably not. Oculus did the right thing just denylisting questionable USB3 controllers (mostly AMD CPU/chipset type) and making everyone go buy dedicated PCIE USB3 controllers or Intel.
would just wire in
I do, and anyone doing ‘gaming’ or VR, or anything else remotely realtime should too. As I mentioned, it is possible to get a dedicated router to work as a WiFi Ethernet bridge, with much more dependable results (assuming the Ethernet is decent of course… most Intel Ethernet is).
FWIW, I am not a fan of Intel. But they do have some decent USB3 and Ethernet devices out there, and relatively good single-core performance.
Sure but honestly old Wifi G and Early N are likely to be good vs a lot of newer cards/tech which is more often using consumers as guinea pig$.
I recall Asus released Sabertooth 990fx Tuff enough board with a hybrid PCI-X 16 v3.0. It ended up performing very bad even if mem serves than pci-x v2.0. Asus quietly revised this model omitting the pci-x 3.0.
A lot of old tested and true hardware had tge benefits or much better testing prior to release. Now more and more manufacturers and software rely on “release now” patch later with firmware and updates.
It was remarked long ago that pitool was requesting a lot of Network access checking for updates more frequently than maybe needed and seemed to be sending some stats info on steam/game launching… Don’t know if this was resolved or not.
This is where we need to have something in Windows and other OSes like Android that notify what permissions the ap is requesting with a note from DeV on why it wants permission to access resources ie what for.