well this is not such a tough question to answer.

You have two choices.

1. The CP 1612 or any other Ethernet NIC in your PC. The CP 1612 is discontinued as far as I know, so you have to use a Ethernet NIC, e.g. 3COM 905 to work with SOFNET S7 for Industrial Ethernet, there you need theAdvanced version, because you need more than 8 Connections.

2. If you want to have some preprocessing on the CP in yourPC and you want to relive the PC CPU, even so they are very strong right now, fromcommunication work... than you can use the CP 1613 with S7 1613.

These are the two choices you have. I personally would say... today it is a matter of preference.

Best regards

The difference to the CP 1613 is that the CP 1613 has a single CPU on Board for preprocessing. It is able to handle up to 120 Connections by itself. So you can reach more Stations with one CP. Additionally you can plug more than one CP in the PC, so you can reach up to 207 Connectionson yourPC. Needless to say that the CP relieves the PC CPU from some work, so you may have more performance to spend on HMI Software... for example.

Best regards