10/100 Lan vs Gigabyte Lan

[news_reader]

Are there differences here that are warranted to stay with a motherboard
that has gigabyte lan? doing an upgrade and looking at a AsRock 939 board
that has agp and pci video but only 10/100 lan.

Thoughts please.

Terry

 

[John McGaw]

Are there differences here that are warranted to stay with a motherboard
that has gigabyte lan? doing an upgrade and looking at a AsRock 939 board
that has agp and pci video but only 10/100 lan.

Thoughts please.

Terry

Gigabit lan is really great! But only if you are going to invest in
other gigabit equipment and cables to go with it. Or if you intend to do
so within the expected retention of the new MB. If you are a "normal"
home user who will be using the LAN to connect to a broadband modem or
to share a broadband modem through a router/switch and to throw in a
little file transfer and printer sharing on the side 100mbit is fine. In
fact if you are just doing the broadband connection 10mbit is more than
enough.

And, if you do decide somewhere down the road that you simply must have
a gigabit lan for some reason an add-on card should be relatively cheap
-- they aren't even that expensive now.

 

[General Schvantzkoph]

Are there differences here that are warranted to stay with a motherboard
that has gigabyte lan? doing an upgrade and looking at a AsRock 939 board
that has agp and pci video but only 10/100 lan.

Thoughts please.

Terry

Depends on what you are doing, there are a lot of other bottlenecks in a
typical system such as the disk access time or the CPU. Unless you are
building a file server you won't notice any difference between a 100Mb and
a Gigabit connection.

 

[news_reader]

Thank you gents.....

Depends on what you are doing, there are a lot of other bottlenecks in a
typical system such as the disk access time or the CPU. Unless you are
building a file server you won't notice any difference between a 100Mb and
a Gigabit connection.

 

[Michael C]

Depends on what you are doing, there are a lot of other bottlenecks in a
typical system such as the disk access time or the CPU. Unless you are
building a file server you won't notice any difference between a 100Mb and
a Gigabit connection.

100Mbit is 10Mbyte/sec at best. Most HDDs these days can do 40 and even some
usb pen drives claim to be able to do 20 (133x). So it would be quite
possible to notice the speed although I agree it's probably not worth it
unless you have a special need.

Michael

 

[kony]

Are there differences here that are warranted to stay with a motherboard
that has gigabyte lan? doing an upgrade and looking at a AsRock 939 board
that has agp and pci video but only 10/100 lan.

Thoughts please.

Terry

In a home lan, Gigabit networks are most useful for moving
large files, not internet access or other basic uses which
are fully satisfied by 100Mb. By large I mean either dozens
of MB per file or more, or many many moderate sized, say a
few MB each files. If you have that situation then
definitely use Gigabit as it makes a substantial difference.
Even considering general system PCI bus or HDD bottlenecks,
any semi-modern system can expect at least 3X the throughput
and often signficantly more in such large file transfer
scenarios.

What do you mean that the Asrock board has PCI video? If it
has integrated video, it is most likely an AGP ported
video... just because it has an AGP port too, that doesn't
make it PCI video. That is an advantage for using the
video, but rarely a disadvantage as it means that if you
installed an AGP card, it must necessarily disable the
onboard video. Not "really" such a disadvantage though, as
either way for a 2nd display you'd need a PCI video card,
except rarely even integrated video can support two
displays.

Some integrated Gigabit network adapters are better than
others but if you really want that board and don't need
utmost Gigabit performance (which i suspect else you'd
already know it) then you can always get a PCI Gigibit
adapter later for about $15. These cheap $15 cards are not
as fast, but they do still give you at least the 3X increase
in real-world throughput on large files that I've mentioned
above.

If you found multiple reasons why the Asrock board isn't
sufficient though, you might consider a better board,
especially if you'll be using it long-term. $30 more for a
board used for 3 years for example, is under $1 a month.

 

[Ian East]

Are there differences here that are warranted to stay with a motherboard
that has gigabyte lan? doing an upgrade and looking at a AsRock 939 board
that has agp and pci video but only 10/100 lan.

Thoughts please.

Terry

Looking at this board, I assume you're going to use this for desktop
use. Unless you have any specific need for gigabit ethernet (and have
GigE switches and your other computers are GigE), 100baseTX should be
fine.

 

[Ian East]

On Thu, 8 Sep 2005 20:25:16 -0300, "news_reader"

What do you mean that the Asrock board has PCI video? If it
has integrated video, it is most likely an AGP ported
video... just because it has an AGP port too, that doesn't
make it PCI video. That is an advantage for using the
video, but rarely a disadvantage as it means that if you
installed an AGP card, it must necessarily disable the
onboard video. Not "really" such a disadvantage though, as
either way for a 2nd display you'd need a PCI video card,
except rarely even integrated video can support two
displays.

What he means is that it has both an AGP slot and PCI-X slot.