GigaBit LAN

[Werty]

just wondering, is gigabit useful in a LAN gaming network nowadays? will it give better network performance while playing on lan?

 

[nweaver]

not really, considering most games are optimized for broadband, that runs 1-8 Mb/s

 

[Viperoni]

Continuing on what mweaver said, gigabit is really only useful for larger file transfers.

 

[ForumMaster]

there's no current reason to unless you transfer lot's of files. as nweaver said, current games can't full utilize all the bandwidth.

 

[InlineFive]

Even if you had a LAN party with upwards of 60 people you would still be fine running a few servers on a 100Mbps LAN simply because the games are optimized for it. Now if those people were also swapping files then you might run into problems.

 

[networkman]

My own experience with Gigabit at home and the occasional LAN party, is that it's good for those times where either you're doing large file swaps(videos/renderings) or getting the latest drivers, patches, maps, mods, etc. There doesn't seem to be any appreciable difference in how well games play over the LAN compared to a 100bT switch.

Edit: My mention of drivers/patches/maps/mods above is for those items I've already downloaded to one of my file-servers.

 

[Werty]

ok i think i get... normal lan games, of any genre, old one or new ones wont be affected and dont need anything above 100Mbit lan connection.... unless, im doin file transfer from one comp to the other, right....

my next question, i have read that using gigabit lan/network need new cables? will my home-made Cat5 cables now wont work for gigabit setup? coz ive seen internet shops here that they just replace thier lancards and hub to 1Gbit without replacing thier old cables and stil get 1Gbit connetion in Windows LAN(i dont know the transfer rate though). will this work too?

 

[InlineFive]

Originally posted by: Werty
ok i think i get... normal lan games, of any genre, old one or new ones wont be affected and dont need anything above 100Mbit lan connection.... unless, im doin file transfer from one comp to the other, right....

my next question, i have read that using gigabit lan/network need new cables? will my home-made Cat5 cables now wont work for gigabit setup? coz ive seen internet shops here that they just replace thier lancards and hub to 1Gbit without replacing thier old cables and stil get 1Gbit connetion in Windows LAN(i dont know the transfer rate though). will this work too?

If your cables are Cat5e then I believe it can run 1000BASE-T. You will need Cat6 cable if you want to run 1000BASE-TX, which isn't a huge deal if your house is already wired with Cat5e.

And file transfer slowing down the network depends. A good switch should have enough horsepower to do full-duplex switching for each port, no shared bandwidth. Since a typical computer may utilize 50-75% of a 100Mbit connection you would need to have two "leeching" clients in order to slow down the connection for the "peer" computer. Other clients should not be effected.

 

[Goosemaster]

1. gigabit free's up the server to recieve mroe individual packets/sec. Seeing as how gaming uses such small amounts of data, it won't really affect performance IMHO.


That said, for a LAN party, where you havea a herterogeneous mixture of data transfers (pron swaping, game swaping, torrent swaping, voip, skype, IM'ing, ftping, patching, etc, gigabit at elast at the core, will defintiely help out if the servers are gettign pounded, but onyl if the servers have the necessary hardware to keep up.