Does gigabit LAN make a big difference?

Hi all -

It is time once again to rebuild my main rig into a bigger and badder one...

I am interested in ASRock's new socket 939 mobo seen here due to it's good performance and stability, but providing a bridge for AGP to PCIe as well as 939 to M2.

My only real aversion to the mobo is that it only has 10/100 LAN. My current rig has gigabit LAN, and I can't really tell the difference, at least in normal internet use. I'm planning on building a central file server, so the extra bandwidth would make a bigger difference there.

Any thoughts about whether or not gigabit LAN is worth looking at other mobo's? Or maybe just a PCI or PCIe1x gigabit NIC would keep me safe?

TIA

gigabit lan need all the cables and switch to support it also.

But the general increase is about 30%

It's not the NIC you need to worry about...gigabit switches are still pretty spendy...and you need that in order for the gigabit nic to do you any good.

For transferring large (or large amounts at one time) of files, gigabit helps...otherwise 100mbit is just fine

and contrary to popular belief...you DO NOT need Cat6 cables in a gigabit network...cat5e cables are capable of such speeds

My current Dell 400SC has a gigabit lan controller, and I used to have a 600SC that also had gigabit. Without a gigabit switch I just used a crossover cable to connect them and the speeds were definitely a lot faster than 100mbit. But the things that you will have to keep in mind is the amount of memory and the speed of your hard drive. With those speeds, I found I was saturating my memory and the hard drive just could not keep up causing a lot of speed loss.

telexen said:

It's not the NIC you need to worry about...gigabit switches are still pretty spendy...

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Actually, they're pretty darn cheap

telexen said:

For transferring large (or large amounts at one time) of files, gigabit helps...otherwise 100mbit is just fine

and contrary to popular belief...you DO NOT need Cat6 cables in a gigabit network...cat5e cables are capable of such speeds

Click to expand...

Right on the money with that, telexen. I'm using CAT5e with the D-Link and am able to transfer a 1GB file across workstations in just under 15 seconds.

eh? said:

gigabit lan need all the cables and switch to support it also.

But the general increase is about 30%

Click to expand...

while it is true that your switch needs to support gigabit, not to mention both devices would need to be gigabit as well to see any speed increase. you should see much more than a 30% increase. i setup gigabit between my fileserver to my main pc and i could transfer files at 30Mbytes/sec. and this was simply due to the limitation of the pci bus and drives. a true gigabit connection w/o bottlenecks should support about 80Mbytes/sec. here is a list of what you should expect with network speeds:

10Mbit =~ 1Mbytes/sec
100Mbit =~ 10Mbytes/sec
1000Mbit =~ 100Mbytes/sec

conversion is 8 bits to the byte, then theres about 20% protocol overhead.

also, to answer your question, no gigabit vs 100mbit will not make your internet connection faster. it will make your connection to your fileserver much faster though (almost as fast as the drive being local).

bobbyseatbelt said:

...a true gigabit connection w/o bottlenecks should support about 80Mbytes/sec...

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Yup, right inline with what I'm getting with 2 Nforce4 machines connected through the D-Link.

***Edit*** WHOHOO! My 1000th post! Too bad it was inane...

Awesome, thanks for the quick responses. I've got a gigabit switch already, I just didn't know if taking advantage of it would yield a big difference...Since I will be building a file server for pretty big files, I'm going to look for a mobo with native support just to make it simple.

Thanks all!

getting a board with native support (ie not on the pci bus) should give better results than an addon card in the future. im also not too sure about that asrock board you mentioned. i do see that it offers future upgrades (M2 socket addon), but im not too sure how reliable this (the M2 daughterboard) would be.

if i were you, i'd just go with a NF4 based epox board and upgrade to M2 once it matures a little and the price drops. by that time there will likely be much better things out that will be worth upgrading the motherboard for anyways...

Depends on how much your transfering, I was gald I had gigabit when I was transfering 75GB

bobbyseatbelt said:

if i were you, i'd just go with a NF4 based epox board and upgrade to M2 once it matures a little and the price drops. by that time there will likely be much better things out that will be worth upgrading the motherboard for anyways...

Click to expand...

Not a bad idea, but funds are a little limited right now, and I have a bit invested in my AGP vid card, and want to avoid buying a new one right away. I won't use SLI, so the ASRock was attractive. Seems to be really stable and a good overclocker, so for the price, it's not ugly. Upgradeability to future sockets seems dubious, I admit, and I'd just build a whole new rig for that, so that doesn't matter too much to me. Thanks for the input regardless.