Originally posted by: JASTECH
Which cat should I use, cat5, cat5e or cat6? My router is a Netgear MR-314 and I am thinking of getting the D-Link 655 to replace it with. What do you think? Thanks, JAS
Also, what about "Jumbo Frames" settings? Or anything else in there I can change to help speed things up?
As to general performance improvement, there's Internet, wireless, and gigabit. They're three different spaces, each with their own issues. Perhaps if you gave more details on what your setup would be and esp. more details on the area that you'd like sped up, more specific help could be given.
The DIR-655 is a good choice, but it doesn't support jumbo frames, like most routers. However, IMO jumbo frames are generally over-hyped, and most people do just fine to forget about them.
OTOH, I understand wanting to have that capability assuming your NICs support it. You can get that using an add-on gigabit switch. Most current ones, including the D-Link DGS-220x, support 9K jumbo frames.
Small Net Builder's got some decent stuff these days. They have a detailed review on the DIR-655, and also a detailed article on jumbo frames. Where they miss out IMO on the jumbo frames article is getting past the hype and showing actual performance differences with / without jumbo frames with decent modern hardware. In their defense, you can see such differences when you use consumer NAS boxes -- and they've got lots of consumer NAS box benchmarks to back that up -- but once you get beyond low power hardware as included with such devices, gigabit speed doesn't become so difficult for the hardware itself to support, and the benefits aren't always so great. To do a full analysis on this part is difficult though, because reality, unlike theory, is very complicated and doesn't like to be greatly simplified. You can get great performance without jumbo frames, but jumbo frames can also help improve performance in some cases.
