On 6/14/07, Jeff Macdonald <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> What can you reasonably expect a pci gigabit card to give you for >> through put? > > I thought I read somewhere gig ether should be on the motherboard, not PCI.
Many modern motherboards do include one or more gig Ether ports. Sometimes, these are just connected to internal PCI buses. Sometimes, they're even all on the same PCI bus. Sometimes they use internal PCI Express ports. Sometimes they hook directly into a special path on one of the core chips. You can get varying levels of performance here, depending on the specifics. There's PCI in multiple flavors (32-bit vs 64-bit, 33 MHz vs 66 MHz), PCI-X (some sort of extension to the classic PCI bus), and PCI Express (totally different electrically; serial rather than parallel). I do agree with Patrick Flaherty and Tom Buskey that the NIC may not be the constraint (although a cheap chipset can certainly kill your performance). You need to worry about bus bandwidth (for NIC and disk controller), disks, disk controller, core logic, IP stack, application software, kernel tuning, and sometimes even RAM and CPU (depending on the workload). And you need to worry about that on both computers. Cable and switch quality can also matter, too. A bad cable can cause all manner of problems. And I've heard of cheap gig switches which couldn't actually forward data that fast. -- Ben _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/