State Of The Technology

[Lavrenti Beria]

Its been five years since I've had to concern myself with hardware questions but I have one concerning the state of the technology concerning network card speeds. I have four boxes here on a local network all with 3COM NICs and linked via a four port router to each other and to an ADSL provider. The NICs all support 10/100 mbps speeds as was state of the art in 2002. Have network speeds improved since then, to 1000 mbps routinely perhaps? Looking at the 3COM site you'd never be able to conclude that there was a latest version card supporting speeds that high. What NICs are considered highest quality today? Does on board support for 1000 mbps exist anywhere today? I'd appreciate being brought up-to-date.

Lavrenti Beria

 

[kevnich2]

Since this sounds like a serious question, I'll give you a serious answer. 10/100 NIC's are very common but pretty much yesterday's technology. Gig-E is the new NIC. Onboard Gig-E NIC's are available in pretty much all new motherboards as of about two years ago I'd say. My experience has been with Intel's NIC's and they've been pretty good. Pretty cheap now also. But you have to have atleast Cat5e to run Gig ethernet, Cat5 won't run it.

 

[mxnerd]

I would say INTEL. The onboard network has high failure rate, especially if the chip is VIA or REALTEK.

However, just because technology advanced doesn't mean you have to upgrade accordingly. It all depends what you do.

If you are only using your PC for MS Office works, internet browsing, and you don't transfer files A LOT between PCs, you don't need 1000M bits/s speed.

Internet is usually only 1.7M bits/s for DSL or 3.0M bits/s for cable, unless you have fiber, that will be 30M bits/s. You can only go as fast as the weakest link.

Your 100M bits/s will serve you well.

 

[Lavrenti Beria]

Kevnich2,

I sincerely appreciate your reply. I haven't built a computer since 2002, haven't needed to or could have afforded to, so I'm woefully out of touch with the present state of computer technology. Your reply answers my question in every detail.

I'm planning to build a new main box after the X38 chipset and DDR3 become available in some variety. A SCSI enthusiast, it'll have an Adaptec SAS card and Seagate HDDs. So on these aspects I'm current, but the latest network technology has passed me by entirely.

Again thanks.


mxnerd,

Your reply is appreciated as well, particularly your endorsement of Intel cards. On only one occasion in the past have I chosen on-board and would agree that its less satisfactory. My need for speed is conditioned on the fact that I backup the principal drive on my main box to a second drive on another computer on the network using TCP/IP. The new main box I'd mentioned above will be quite quick so I'd want to accomodate as much of the new processor's speed as possible in these transfers. That's the main consideration. Will the new 1000 speeds help me or with this objective are they superfluous?

Regards,

Lavrenti Beria

 

[mxnerd]

In theory 1000M bits/s = 100M bits/s, in the real world, however

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000339.html

This guy found gigabit performance is about 3 times faster than fast ethernet.

My own experience is also probably 3 times faster. But I'm using gigabit PCI, not PCI-X or PCI-E.

So I don't have a hard figure.



And remember, your hard disk probably tops out at 75M bytes/s = 750M bits/s

And whether you need gigabit also depends on how many files/data must be backed up.

Maybe someone in the forum can answer the question.

Oops, duplicated post.

 

[mxnerd]

In theory 1000M bits/s = 100M bits/s, in the real world, however

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000339.html

This guy found gigabit performance is about 3 times faster than fast ethernet.

My own experience is also probably 3 times faster. But I'm using gigabit PCI, not PCI-X or PCI-E.

So I don't have a hard figure.



And remember, your hard disk probably tops out at 75M bytes/s = 750M bits/s

My figure could be wrong since I'm referring to IDE/SATA drive.

And whether you need gigabit also depends on how many files/data must be backed up.

Maybe someone in the forum can answer the question.

 

[kevnich2]

If this is a new computer you're building, I don't see why you shouldn't go with a Gig NIC, and I also endorse Intel on that. Onboard NIC's are usually prone to failure. If this was an existing computer that you were talking about that is just used for web browsing, occasional file transfers, basically just home use, I don't see a reason to upgrade. But for it being a new computer and the price of a good Intel Gig-E NIC, I'd say go for it. Also, on my home network, I can eat up about 85% of my gig-e card on my file server and I will say the files transfer very fast. I built a new file server and then upgraded my home network to a Gig-E 8-port switch and cards in my desktop and for me, it was worth it.

 

[Lavrenti Beria]

mxnerd,

You say:

"My own experience is also probably 3 times faster. But I'm using gigabit PCI, not PCI-X or PCI-E."

As far as I know there were no fast ethernet cards accomodated by PCI-X or PCI-E when I bought mine. Your thought is that better speeds might be achieved with, say, gigabit PCI-E? I would guess PCI-E would be a more natural choice than PCI-X, what say? I'm very likely going to have to pick a board with multiple PCI-E slots. The SAS card I'm buying will use PCI-E.

Your comments are very helpful, thanks.

Lavrenti Beria

 

[JackMDS]

Do you need extra Bandwidth or you just want to spend money on new technology?

Most new Mobos have onboard Giga NIC.

However in the scheme of thing buying a Mobo according to the NIC's chipset is usually Not a priority.

Buy the Mob that you need and if the onboard Giga card is not answer your "prayer" you can buy the Intel and stick it in.

In any case Gina is Not really functional Giga; it does not contribute anything to the Internet experience, so unless you have a specific it is not a crucial issue, and can be dealt with when the time comes.
Home Giga Network: http://www.ezlan.net/giga.html

Giga networking - http://www.ezlan.net/giga_net.html

 

[Lavrenti Beria]

kevnich2,

Yes, this will be a new main box. I've decided to retire two of the computers on the network; one was dedicated to doing software testing for a Linux distro I was helping for a while and that's now long behind me, and the other a PII box I've upgraded to the limit but find too slow now to keep in service at all. I'd like to have two very quick peer connected computers here in the end and while at first I thought that I'd simply move the hardware presently on the main machine over to it, will possibly do some modernizing on the ancillary machine as well. I presently have an Intel 850 board with a P4 2.26 processor, 512 Megs of 1066 RDRAM, an Adaptec Ultra 160 SCSI card, with one 10,000 RPM Cheetah, and two smaller 7200 RPM SCSI drives. The CD writer is a SCSI Plextor and I'm using a Matrox 550 video card. As you know, the NICs are 3COM. All of these wouldn't be bad for an ancillary computer that's there for occasional use and for back-up storage but for the fast ethernet limitation. I may get a second new board and NIC so as to speed up these back-ups which now take about 13 minutes using GHOST 2003 in DOS mode over TCP/IP.

While we're at it, with these new X38, DDR3 supporting boards would you expect Abit or Gigabyte to deliver the more reliable product, the more stable one. Used to be that Abit was a bit unstable what with all the BIOS flexibility they offered. Five years ago Gigabyte was emerging as a very reliable board with tons of useful features. Your thoughts?

Thanks for your earlier input.

Lavrenti Beria

 

[mxnerd]

Here is another test.

This time it's RealTek 8169 gigabit PCI on Sun Fire, MacBook Gigabit and T1 105

http://www.unixzone.dk/unix/20...k-gigabit-performance/

 

[Lavrenti Beria]

Hi JackMDS,

Many thanks for the thoughts, the help and the urls. I note that both the material and you imply that the ADSL side of the equation is not likely to experience much improvement but the LAN side will with these 1000 speeds. As you can see above, my main concern is in speeding up TCP/IP transfers of back-ups, Peer-To-Peer. I'm aware that realizing much of that objective concerns itself with processor speeds but if I can improve upon fast ethernet by using either a new board's native capability or with an Intel card I'll do it.

Regards.

Lavrenti Beria

 

[kevnich2]

In my experience, I like gigabyte over Abit. But that question would be better answered in the motherboard forum. They can tell you exactly what you're looking for and the best one for it.