5 port Gigabit 1000mbps switch - $49.99

[Braxus]

Airlink AGIGA5SW 5-port GigE switch for $49.99 strait up @ BA Fry's. Cheapest on pricewatch seems to be 66 bucks alone.

Can't beat the price unless you get rebates involved.

 

[joebob23]

is ther any giga network cards out yet?

 

[MrPaulAR]

Yea, why else would you need a gigabit switch.

About 15 seconds on Google, or your favorite store (NewEgg) should answer all your questions.

 

[simo]

I heard that to make Gigabit worth the extra expense, you really have to chose a decent card, otherwise you'll end up getting 200Mbps instead of 900Mbps.

Apparently you need a 64-Bit bus PCI card from one of the big brands like 3ware or 3com, not one of the $15 POS from "Airlink" (Fry's).

This switch might be worth getting though, although 5 port is kinda too small to be worthwhile.....

 

[nekote]

Too bad Fry's cyber outlet (Outpost.com) has it (AGIGA5SW) at $84.99

 

[Fritzo]

The new Asus motherboards are coming with 3Com gigabit adapters built in. Makes the network access as fast as my hard drive

 

[nickmarine]

Should work great on my G5

Nick

 

[Braxus]

Originally posted by: simo
I heard that to make Gigabit worth the extra expense, you really have to chose a decent card, otherwise you'll end up getting 200Mbps instead of 900Mbps.

Apparently you need a 64-Bit bus PCI card from one of the big brands like 3ware or 3com, not one of the $15 POS from "Airlink" (Fry's).

This switch might be worth getting though, although 5 port is kinda too small to be worthwhile.....

True to some extent. Most PCI desktop/workstation cards, no matter how expensive won't top out given the limitations of the PCI bus, even with a good card. Unless you're on a uber high end system, most likely you don't even have a 64-bit PCI slot. Also, consider your hard drive I/O as well. Most folks don't even get access near 900Mbps with all the seeking/writing/reading/etc going on the hard drive.

The $15 gigabit cards at Fry's are realtek based. I seem to get around 35-40Mbps sustained (~300Mbps). Considering I have a RAID-0 array sitting on the same bus, it's about right. Just wish that some AMD K7 chipset manufacturer would put both RAID support and GbE on one the southbridge instad of linking using the PCI bus! VIA's the only K7 chipset manufacturer that I know that offers at least RAID support via a non-PCI bus link.

 

[NogginBoink]

If you're talking about communications between only two machines, PCI bus limitations come into play.

But if you're looking at network bandwidth supplying hundreds of machines, having gigabit capacity on the network helps a lot even though no one computer can saturate the bandwidth of the network.

 

[Baldy18]

I have two 64-bit PCI slots in my ASUS A7M266-D and gigbit built into my IBM Thinkpad T40. Too bad I don't have a Fry's in my area.

 

[Fallen Kell]

Glad I have Intel's Canterwood chipset with the gigabit ethernet on its own bus

 

[BatmanNate]

I might jump on this. I have 3com gigabit built in to my motherboard, and my file server is really bottlenecked at 100mb, especially when a few people hit it at once. A few questions about the cabling though:

Is special cable necessary? Cat-5, Cat-5e, or Cat-6? Also, are the ends still RJ-45? I used to have 64bit PCI on my dual athlon, I should have kept that for the file server instead of this poor aging BP6.

EDIT: Here's the cable requirements:

4-pair UTP Cat. 5, EIA/TIA-568 100-ohm screened twisted-pair (STP)

 

[Hammer]

cat5e or 6

 

[Lurker1]

you can easily saturate a 100Mbps network with 2 computers. That's only 12.5MBps.

Gigabit will get you a theoretical max of 125 MBps, which is still less than the theoretical 133MBps max of a PCI bus.

So this would still be a good deal. Especially for those large pic/video/MP3 transfers....

 

[BatmanNate]

Well, I picked one up at the Renton, WA Fry's during lunch. It was not advertised in the flier, the box said 89.99, but the shelf said 49.99 and that's what it rang up at. They also had a Netgear 10/100/1000 PCI card for 19.99 after $10 MIR that I didn't see advertised. Bonus.

 

[Braxus]

Originally posted by: Lurker1
you can easily saturate a 100Mbps network with 2 computers. That's only 12.5MBps.

Gigabit will get you a theoretical max of 125 MBps, which is still less than the theoretical 133MBps max of a PCI bus.

So this would still be a good deal. Especially for those large pic/video/MP3 transfers....

To my understanding, if you're on a switched network, only the connection between those two computers will be saturated, the rest of the nodes on the network can still do their merry business.

 

[CyberZenn]

Originally posted by: Lurker1
you can easily saturate a 100Mbps network with 2 computers. That's only 12.5MBps.

Gigabit will get you a theoretical max of 125 MBps, which is still less than the theoretical 133MBps max of a PCI bus.

Yes, but remember that the PCI bus is shared between all of your PCI devices and, depending on your motherboard architecture, most of your integrated devices as well. You need a 64bit/66mhz PCI slot to take take full advantage of gigabit ethernet w/ most x86 based systems.

 

[CyberZenn]

Originally posted by: Hammer
cat5e or 6

You can actually get by with gigabit on regular old cat 5, but its less reliable - especially over longer distances. Cat 5e is better shielded against interference and signal degredation.

 

[Lurker1]

Originally posted by: Braxus

Originally posted by: Lurker1
you can easily saturate a 100Mbps network with 2 computers. That's only 12.5MBps.

Gigabit will get you a theoretical max of 125 MBps, which is still less than the theoretical 133MBps max of a PCI bus.

So this would still be a good deal. Especially for those large pic/video/MP3 transfers....

To my understanding, if you're on a switched network, only the connection between those two computers will be saturated, the rest of the nodes on the network can still do their merry business.

Depends on the quality of your switches and their backplane. I know for a fact that older Cisco switches (things like 7500s) could have their backplanes saturated as you could have more total ports than the backplane's bandwidth could support. I've not investigated how these SOHO switches are constructed, so I cannot comment on their true maximum throughput. Theoretically, a 5 port Gigbit switch should be able to handle a maximum of 5Gbps, with 5 PTP connections. Be interesting if this even comes close, as the overhead for TCP usually knocks you down to anywhere from 80-95% of maximum throughput for a single PTP connection. Any additional traffic will knock that down even more. Average transfer rates on larger switched networks with many to many are usually running about 35% of maximum transfer rates (as witnessed on real 100/1000 Mbps networks with about 10K machines on them).

 

[Lurker1]

Originally posted by: CyberZenn

Originally posted by: Lurker1
you can easily saturate a 100Mbps network with 2 computers. That's only 12.5MBps.

Gigabit will get you a theoretical max of 125 MBps, which is still less than the theoretical 133MBps max of a PCI bus.

Yes, but remember that the PCI bus is shared between all of your PCI devices and, depending on your motherboard architecture, most of your integrated devices as well. You need a 64bit/66mhz PCI slot to take take full advantage of gigabit ethernet w/ most x86 based systems.

Depends on how your system is setup. A file server may only have video, disks, and a network adapter on two PCI buses, or some or all may be integrated and shared, or not shared.

A 64bit 66MHz bus will peak at ~528MBps. A 64bit 33MHz bus will peak at ~214MBps. The true benefit of 64 bit buses is that they're a separate subsystem than your 32 bit bus, although I do not know explicitly how that translates into data transfer between the PCI buses, the bridges, cpu, and memory. It's been a little too long since I looked into those aspects.

However, being able to make use of Gigbit does not require 64bit PCI buses. It more accurately depends on what you're doing, since you could be accessing an in-memory DB or generating large amounts of information via requests that have nothing to do with disk access. In those cases, the PCI bus issues may not even crop up, and you could saturate a Gigbit network with even a standard PCI bus hard disk system.

As a final note in the case of files, file transfer speed is limitted by disk data transfer speeds. That ATA133 does not do continuous data transfer at 133 MBps. Nor does scsi. To actually hit continuous data transfer speeds in that range requires RAID 0 or 5 (most common 2) with the appropriate number of disks in the appropriate configuration to support the continuous transfer at 125MBps +. For a SCSI RAID 5 system consisting of a single U320 channel with 3 15K drives in RAID 0 could conceivably support Gigabit throughput. However, this is extremely dependent on the disks used, file system organization, etc.

 

[Tsunami982]

does anyone know how good the marvel gigabit chip that comes with the asus a7n8x-e is?

 

[Balthazar]

Originally posted by: NogginBoink
If you're talking about communications between only two machines, PCI bus limitations come into play.

But if you're looking at network bandwidth supplying hundreds of machines, having gigabit capacity on the network helps a lot even though no one computer can saturate the bandwidth of the network.

Precisely because no one computer can saturate the network

 

[txxxx]

Originally posted by: CyberZenn

Originally posted by: Lurker1
you can easily saturate a 100Mbps network with 2 computers. That's only 12.5MBps.

Gigabit will get you a theoretical max of 125 MBps, which is still less than the theoretical 133MBps max of a PCI bus.

Yes, but remember that the PCI bus is shared between all of your PCI devices and, depending on your motherboard architecture, most of your integrated devices as well. You need a 64bit/66mhz PCI slot to take take full advantage of gigabit ethernet w/ most x86 based systems.

Very true - if you have RAID-0 disk configuration ....

Most peoples disk subsystem wont be pushing anything near 125MB/s, more like half, and the disk controllers are on a seperate bus in most modern system cases, so this wont be much of an issue.

You can easily push 350mbits+ through a PCI adapter, which is a nice 3.5x boost against 100base-T. But you certainly dont need a 64bit/66mhz PCI slot to take full advantage, as other components will be maxed out anyway, which leaves you running at full pelt.

 

[Lurker1]

BTW, when I walked into my Fry's yesterday (DFW), this switch was listed at $79. (At least I think it was, there was only 1 Airlink gigbit switch, didn't check the model number).

 

[Devistater]

There's a AT thread for the INTEL gigabit pci cards for around $30ish shipped. There's a link to tomshardware review where he compared the gigabit intel to realtek and others. Intel did better in most of the areas.