Gigabit Ethernet...

[yokem55]

Does anyone here know much about gigabit ethernet adapter's? Specifically, I want to know it I can use a crossover rj45 to hook up two systems. Also, does anyone know what brand would work well? On Pricewatch I see the addtron brand, the Ark brand, and the dlink brand board....I know d link has a repution of some sort...but they are a bit more expensive....anyways, the reason I'm going for gigabit is that I want to do hi-resolution video frame-serving from one of my pc's to another.....100mbit is simply not enough.....

 

[mcveigh]

I think you need Cat6 not cat 5, and it's expensive, as well as the network adapters and switched. But the prices are falling

 

[Garion]

Yes, it's just Ethernet, so you can use a crossover. It must be Cat5E, not Cat6, however. Whatever you do, make sure you get 64-bit PCI cards, not 32-bit. The 32-bit ones just can't keep up with the network. the 64-bit cards are backwards compatible to 32-bit slots, if that's all you have, but it's good for futureproofing, in any case.

- G

 

[nightowl]

In addition to what Garion said, even if you get a 64bit PIC nic and you put it in 32bit PCI slot you still will not get the most out of your NIC. This is due to the PCI bus being saturated with data from the NIC and other PCI devices. If you were to put a 64bit NIC in a 64bit PCI slot then you would get the most out of your NIC. Also, you are going to be limited by your hard drives sustained transfer rate as the amout of data you can send over a gigabit NIC.

 

[mcveigh]

I thought cat6 could do 550 mbs + and cat5e only 350? Or would this not really affect throughput?

 

[spidey07]

Sure, you can use a crossover cable to connect two machines (you'll need Cat5e or higher). I'm rather partial to Intel Gigabit nics simply because the perform well and the drivers are always solid with good features.

Trick is you can't just use a regular ethernet crossover cable. I'm still searching for the pinouts for you. 1000 Base-T uses all four pairs in a rather strange pinout. I'll post the link as soon as I find it.

But as the others have said - try to use a 64-bit card.

Oh - on the cat5e vs cat6. 1000 Base-T is 250 Mhz per pair. four pairs=1000 Mb. I think cat5e is spec'd to 350 Mhz.

<edit> check here for pinouts.

 

[yokem55]

Well, I won't need the full 1000mbits, probably really only just about an eighth of it....640x352x24x23.976=~130 mbits/sec (for real time frame serving, faster than real-time would then raise the bandwidth consumption until either the cpu on the serving machine can't decode the mpeg-2 stream any faster, the 32-bit pci bus gets saturated, or the encoding machine can't reencode the frames any faster)

 

[Hanpan]

Another thing to remember is even teh fatest hdd's only transfer about 65mb/s so Unless you have one hell of a raid array you hdd's probablly won't be able to keep up...

 

[yokem55]

Well..with what I'm looking to do, I'll only be needing to pull about 1-6mbits/sec off the hard drive since the mpeg2 data doesn't get decompressed until it is in memory, and then from memory it gets served out as full uncompressed frames to the encoding machine....if this doesn't make sense, pay a trip to doom9.net, and read up on frame-serving...with special regard to things like avisynth...typically it's done within one machine, but since video encoding isn't impacted badly by high latency, it is possible to have one system do the decoding of the source material, and have another system take those decoded video frames, and then reencode them into a more suitable format, in my case, that would be taking mpeg2 data from my video capture card that has been saved on a hard disk, decoding it on demand in real-time (or faster) on one system (my trusty old p3 733), sending the data over an ethernet network to my shiney new p4 1.8, which can then focus all of its time on doing the mpeg-4 encoding...my problem was that my 100mbit ethernet simply couldn't send the uncompressed frames to my p4 fast enough for it all to be worth having the p4 focusing all of its time on encoding.....it was slightly faster having the p4 doing the mpeg2 decoding along with the mpeg-4 encoding....

 

[hoihtah]

i am totally with you on this.

i was just about to start a new thread... on transfering files for video editing purpose.

my set up goes something like this.

i have 2 dv camcorders that needs to receive live feed.
i'm not sure if i can take 2 firewire ports in one computer to handle both.

i have wd 120 bj so sustain transfer rate won't be a problem.
these drivers can do almost 30MB/s at their lowest speed.(29.2-48.8MB/s)
and i only need 3.6MB/s for each DV capturing.

i don't have the system setup yet to know if one pc will be able to capture two dv feed yet.
but it'd be cool if this was possible.
my concerns aren't on the hardware side... but more on the software.
i'm wondering if any software out there suppots this purpose.

if this doesn't work...
then i need to have 2 computer setup .
each taking feed from their own camcorder.

but once the video is captured... i'd like to use one pc to edit them.
and this is where fast networking is necessary.

i was going to go with 100Mbit ethernet setup.

but if my calculation is correct...
8 bit = 1 byte.
so... 100Mbit/s = 12.5MByte/s.

640x352x24x23.976=~130 Mbits/sec = 16.25MB/s

so...
have you found a solution to this issue?

perhaps going with two nic instead of one?
if two gig network over crossed cable would work... that'd be awesome.

 

[Goosemaster]

I HAVEFINALLY FOUND PEOPLE ASKING FOR GIGABIT ON THESE FORUMS WHO ACTUALLY NEEDED IT!! WOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOO!!!


sorry, it has been a while...



Anyways, why not get two Intel NICS and bond them over a swtich that suppots bonding? Gigabit is way too expensive, with switches costing upwards of $1000. You can get switches with a gigabit uplink for $150 but isn't going to help.

goodluck

 

[hoihtah]

so... what are some of the best switches that has bonding function?

 

[Agamar]

Any HP 4000-8000M and the like will do Cisco's Aggregate Trunking (double your bandwidth, with failover if one link fails). I probably wouldn't get a Cisco unless you find a good deal...You might find a smaller cisco that supports it though (the 4000 and 8000M's are big)

 

[Tallgeese]

FARK. Sorry folks, completely useless to the topic of this thread....