Home network speed question....

[silicon]

My home network has three computers connected to an asus gigabit router. computer 1 is 1 year old. computer 2 is 6 years old and computer 3 is about 9 years old. Why then, when i use Lan Speed Test to clock speeds to them computer 3, the oldest, is faster than computer 2? all have gigabit connections. Computer 2 uses a marvel yukon chip and the other 2 computers are intel chipped. can it be an incorrect driver for the marvel yukon chip? it is an 88E8056. All 3 computers show the connection speed at 1gbs.

 

[Fallen Kell]

You are simply seeing the difference of good network cards vs bad ones. Marvel cards are crap if you ask me. Most Intel cards a very good (but they too have their cheaper ones which are not quite so good).

A good gigabit card will do a lot of CPU offload, eliminating the need for lots of data passing back and forth between the card and the CPU (as well as requiring CPU cycles constantly for network traffic).

 

[JackMDS]

You should be aware that the rating on Network components in most cases do not reflect their function Speed but rather the Speed that the Internal Chipset suppose to run on.

The actual functional speeds over the Network can vastly vary depending on the Quality of the cards and some other general network Devices/configuration.

The number of NIC cards manufacturers is rather small (E.g., in Wireless their is only 6 OEM manufacturers).

All vendors use one of the OEM chipset and then take from the OEM's manufacturer the core Drivers and some time add "Garbage" to them.

I usually suggest to people to find what the original Chip set is and then log directly to the OEM support download and install the OEM plain vanilla Drivers.