What is the best NIC for a radio server

Hi everyone,

I run an internet radio station that presently handles about 60 concurrent connections on a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3 motherboard using it's on-board Realtek PCIe GBE Family controller (admittedly a poor piece of on-board equipment) running Windows XP 32-bit. There have been a few complaints over the years of dropped streams and the like, buffering etc. Up to this point I haven't done much about it except for trying some different settings on my current NIC.
However we are about to release mobile apps for iphone and android and I expect a sizeable increase in listenership and thus concurrent connections. I'm expecting about 200~300 concurrent connections. I'm getting ready to install Windows Server 2008 and would like to get the NIC situation worked out at the same time.

Questions:

1.Is Windows Server 2008 a good choice for what I want to do?
2.Can someone recommend a good NIC for the job?

Thanks in advance for your help!

I would imagine the Intel NIC's would be your best bet... your board may already be using one to be honest.

Another thing that may be helpful is to buy a board that has 2 NIC's with teaming which should help...assuming you have enough bandwidth for these connections in the first place...

Thank you for the reply EarthDog.

I have a huge fiber optic pipe as I live in Japan so bandwidth shouldn't be an issue. Could you briefly explain what "teaming" is. I don't know much about NICs unfortunately...

I dont know much about it, so I googled some links for you with your OS that can help...

https://www.google.com/webhp?source...8aff184f&bpcl=38625945&ion=1&biw=1269&bih=913

(again sorry for the google results)

Thanks for the link. I've got some reading to do. Cheers for that.

If you've got a free PCI-E x4, you could get a dual-port for $150 to $200. Either I340 T2 or "Pro/1000 ET" (make sure it's a T, if it is F than you need fiber straight to the server).

Hi petteyg359,

Thanks for your input. I've attached a photo of my gateway/router setup. The fiber optic cable plugs in directly to the gateway device on the left in the photo. This device can act as a router but I've set it to "bridge" and it connects to the router on the right through a standard LAN cable. The router is set up for DHCP and I have the broadcasting server computer and another computer (I use this one for personal computing) connected to the router using standard LAN cables. When you say "you need fiber straight to the server" does this setup qualify as a direct connection?

miyakojimadan said:

When you say "you need fiber straight to the server" does this setup qualify as a direct connection?

Click to expand...

No, only if the fiber cable plugged directly into the computer.

petteyg359 said:

No, only if the fiber cable plugged directly into the computer.

Click to expand...

Got ya. Thanks.