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Gigabit Nics ??

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Xtreme Barton

Member
Joined
Jan 17, 2004
whats the hooplah about these ?? do these really speed things up a bunch ?? what increase going from 10/100 to a gigabit ? also can you expext same performance if you are wired from cable modem to linksys wireless router the to your gigabit nic ?? not expcecting wireless to gian but since you can hardwire up to four computers of the wirless router will it be just as fast ?? also are these the same as nic cards in the category of brands dont mater ? i was told for my regular nic cards that brands dont make a difference they all work just as good as the next .. sorry if i jumbled but now that i seen these, i want to know if i should get one.. would love to have faster internet ...
 
Gigabit is 10 times faster than 100 megabit, assuming the rest of your system can keep up.

That means your lan can move files faster than your hard drive can read or write them.

It won't make any difference to hang your cable/dsl off a gigabit nic... because the cable/dsl is far, far, far, far slower.
 
If connected to cable modem these Nic's do not make any difference. What I have done with these cards is run a dedicated line and gigabit switch between my main rig and my video servers, and wow!, the difference. :attn:

The files that used to take me up to an hour to transfer only takes about 10-15 minutes, if nobody in the house is watchin a movie. :)
 
I had a network guy the other day tell me that I should buy switches that had a gigabit port to connect between my switches ( 50 users between the two buildings) but that had 100 ports for all the users otherwise I would create a bittleneck between the switches. I don't know if that is right or not but this guy is supposed to be the best networking guy in town.
 
hkgonra said:
I had a network guy the other day tell me that I should buy switches that had a gigabit port to connect between my switches ( 50 users between the two buildings) but that had 100 ports for all the users otherwise I would create a bittleneck between the switches. I don't know if that is right or not but this guy is supposed to be the best networking guy in town.

seems like a good idea to me
 
For everyday tasks, 100 Mbps switching is fine for business users.

However, a 100 Mbps line for 50 users will get saturated real fast when carrying traffic between 2 switches.

Hence the 2 gigabit uplink ports to create a Gigabit uplink interface (which can better handle the traffic load) between the 2 switches. :)

Good call. :)
 
The hooplah?

It provides more bandwidth at the cost of increased latency compared to 100Mbit NICs. Typical home broadband connections won't benefit as they're usually limited to 10Mbit (Well, here in Australia, the cables are limited to 10Mbit max).

If you have alot of users OR if you move gigabytes of files on a regular basis, then yes, its worth the investment...Otherwise...Don't waste your time.

Regarding NIC brands, I only go for 3Com/Intel/Marvell. Why? They offer zero CPU usage under load. (in addition to being well supported for a wide variety of OSs).

Whereas cheapo ones like Realtek and VIA ones bring similar performance at the cost of higher CPU usage. (And bring a few headaches occasionally).

In addition, you're actually shifting the bottleneck of performance around...By getting gigabit, you've removed the network performance bottleneck, but shift it to the PCI bus. If you have a mobo that has a separate PCI bus (say 64bit slots), then its not an issue...But if its a typical desktop mobo, you'll see it hit a ceiling.

Typical PCI bus is 133MB/s (in theory, in reality its about 120MB/s or so).
Gigabit ethernet is 125MB/s (in theory)...But we'll say 80% of that to make a conservative estimate to account for latency due to protocol and physical wiring = 100MB/s.

Depending on the chipset, this leaves very little bandwidth left for other devices on the PCI bus. You can see why Intel and Nvidia chipsets now have a dedicated gigabit ethernet connection separate from PCI bus.

There's a few things to consider.
 
Bottleneck won't necessarily be your PCI bus... your harddrive runs WAY slower than your PCI bus does... the only reason there is ATA133 is for cache performance, it can burst the first 8MB (assuming 8MB cache) at 133MB/s, then it'll be stuck at the harddrive's regular read speed.

Personally, I believe it is worth it, especially if you are using it for multimedia or large file (gigabyte+) access over the network. When I can get some cash together, I will be dropping gigabit into my mainbox and fileserver.. at those speeds, there is almost no difference between having a harddrive locally, and having a harddrive in another machine, especially when you use quality NICs.
 
What about SCSI HDDs? Slap-on multiple 15K rpm drives and you very likely have a situation where the gigabit NIC and SCSI fighting each other. Something we all want to avoid.
 
15k rpm, and for that matter 10k rpm, mostly only lowers latency. The drives are just plain mechanically too slow relative to the bus.

If you were talking about a scsi (or for that matter, sata or pata) raid, then you could have a situation where the disks move faster than the network. Course a 3rd thing you'd be dealing with them is filling up your pci bus. You'd want a board with multiple pci busses or a faster pci bus or the ethernet connected straight to the chipset or whatever.
 
So onboard GigaBit is the best? Hmm.. Always thought it still ran on the PCI bus.. The things one learn here!

Then how about onboard RAID? Is that better then a PCI Raid card? When it's all connected to a GigeBit network that is..

Working on a home server that's going to be the primary storage for everything but the OS.
 
So onboard GigaBit is the best? Hmm.. Always thought it still ran on the PCI bus.. The things one learn here!

It depends on the motherboard/chipset. Most of the time, its just sitting on the pci bus. Some of the nforces (and I assume a few others) have it connected straight to the chipset, similar to how some boards have the onboard sata connected. Others here can cite specific boards and chipsets that do this.


Then how about onboard RAID? Is that better then a PCI Raid card? When it's all connected to a GigeBit network that is..

See above.
 
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