can cpu cause network bottleneck

[BKLounger]

so for the past two years I have been on a university campus forced to use their network. I have had an old comp set up as a file/media server for myself (1.8ghz, 768mb ram). The network was limited to a 10mb hardwire speed. I am moving out next week and want to set my apartment up for gigabit hardwire. The most traffic the server would have is streaming media to 2 xbmc machines and maybe a desktop or two.

Now that that info is said my question is if i want to fully utilize gigabit speed for my internal network would the fact that it is only a 1.8ghz machine hinder my speed or is it enough.

 

[NickOlsen8390]

You will most likely be fine. Unless this streaming is HD then i bet you could do it on 10Mb/s Ethernet.
And you could have always got a Gigabit switch at school and plugged your devices into it and then one from the wall to give it all internet. That way you would have Gigabit between your computers and 10Mb/s to the internet. But know that this would only work at the school. Anywhere else you would need a router to share that single ip.

That being said, 1.8Ghz might limit your speed on GigE, Depends more on the OS on the server. If its linux I would say it will be fine, if its windows you might get a little slow down.
Going from my gaming computer(vista ulti 64) to my server (dual core AMD,xp pro sp3) I normally see about 60MB/s of transfer.

 

[BKLounger]

right now the file server is running ubuntu and the streaming is most likely video using the xvid codec.

 

[NickOlsen8390]

You could do that over 10Mb/s ethernet. So no worries.

 

[degibson]

You're also far more likely to be limited by the disks on your server (unless they're in a HW raid configuration) than you will be by your CPU.