Higher speeds with gigabit NIC and same router?

[AtomicDude512]

Netgear GA302T

Would this make my network work any faster with my same old 10/100 Linksys BEFSR41? It has an onboard processor though and perhaps it could go to full 200Mbps full duplex ...

My cable is 5e, I know this only means I can go half-duplex gigabit but that's fast enough for me! Combined with my slow router would this help out also? As with most systems, I am limited by my pathetic PCI bus, of which currently houses a Hercules Fortissimo III sound card and my old Linksys LNE100TX NIC.

Any comments? Thanks!

 

[onelin]

I am going to say no, it won't. In order for gigabit NICs to transfer at greater than 100Mbit speeds, you need hardware capable of it. My friends and I have never broken the 12-13MB/sec barrier over 100Mbit switches with gigabit NICs, but we have done so by a good margin once we plug into a gigabit switch (still quite expensive!)

 

[ScottMac]

First, no. It won't help your connection to/through the router at all.

Next: With no exceptions that I'm aware of, many of the current copper Gig switches & interfaces are more than competent for a minimum of Cat5, with 5e or better being specified in the standard. Cat5e or Cat6 can run full duplex just fine over copper. Copper Gig actually uses all four pair in both directions at the same time (four pair transmitting and receiving concurrently).

There's more to it than the NIC though, the bus feeding the NIC has to have the bandwidth, the CPU has to have the guts, and the OS has to be efficient enough (assuming other factors wouldn't limit the throughput). Finally, the application has to be efficient enough to be able to process the data and get it to the hardware at full flow.

For a LAN (-LOCAL- being the key word), you'd be likely to see some increase in the throughput, just not up to full Gig speeds. If you did a lot of file movement or backup though the LAN, it could help.


Trying to push a firehose worth of information (from a Gig interface) through a coffee stirer (typical consumer WAN / T1-ish bandwidth) isn't going to help at all.

FWIW

Scott

 

[cmetz]

AtomicDude512, if you have a truly crappy network card, like an ISA NE2000 (or a PCI NE2000 for that matter), then yes. If you have anything reasonably modern, the gig board can offload some things from the CPU and make your system perform a little better under heavy network load, but it won't get you better network performance (you're still going to be limited by your DSL/Cable line speed).

Most of the benefits of a gigabit board are LAN side.