Onboard VGA and gigabyte ethernet - mutually exclusive on S754.

[Asfand Yar Qazi]

Hi

I'm looking for a S754 motherboard that will take a 3100+ 64-bit A64. I need
it to have on-board gigabyte LAN as well as VGA, as I'm planning to mash it
into a modded Compaq Deskpro SFF case at some point in the future when I
upgrade to S939 dual-core.

But I can't find ANY MBs that have both gig LAN and onboard VGA! I need
onboard VGA because I don't think I'll be able to fit a video card into the
SFF case I plan to mod.

Know of any MBs? Thanks,
Asfand Yar

 

[Asfand Yar Qazi]

Hi

I'm looking for a S754 motherboard that will take a 3100+ 64-bit A64. I
need it to have on-board gigabyte LAN as well as VGA, as I'm planning to
mash it into a modded Compaq Deskpro SFF case at some point in the
future when I upgrade to S939 dual-core.

But I can't find ANY MBs that have both gig LAN and onboard VGA! I need
onboard VGA because I don't think I'll be able to fit a video card into
the SFF case I plan to mod.

Know of any MBs? Thanks,
Asfand Yar

I've just realised what an idiot I've been - I meant 'gigabit' not 'gigabyte'.

 

[Cal Vanize]

I've just realised what an idiot I've been - I meant 'gigabit' not
'gigabyte'.

Plenty of boards have on-board video.

Any reason you need that fast of a LAN? Fastest copy times would be
baed on hard drive read or write times. Even the very fastest SATA II
drives only read at 60 meg or so. That's well under the 1 gigabit LAN
rates. Even doing a file transfer from our server to my RAID0 computer,
the transfer rates are only abut 60mbs.

 

[Asfand Yar Qazi]

Plenty of boards have on-board video.

Any reason you need that fast of a LAN? Fastest copy times would be
baed on hard drive read or write times. Even the very fastest SATA II
drives only read at 60 meg or so. That's well under the 1 gigabit LAN
rates. Even doing a file transfer from our server to my RAID0 computer,
the transfer rates are only abut 60mbs.

60 Megabytes / sec = 480 Megabits / sec.

So, with 100Mbps LAN, the LAN is the bottleneck.
With 1000Mbps LAN, the drive is the bottleneck, but you're still carrying
about 4 1/2 times more data.

I'd rather have the hard drive as the bottleneck.

BTW, I plan to do most of my file transfers from a RAID 1 setup, which gives
the fastest sequential read speed.

Oh well, since I can't find what I'm looking for (at least in the consumer
space anyway, I'm sure solutions exist in the server market) I suppose I'll
just get a really thin PCI Gigabit LAN card instead. I'll chop a bit off the
metal bracket at the front, and should hopefully manage to squeeze it in.

 

[General Schvantzkoph]

60 Megabytes / sec = 480 Megabits / sec.

So, with 100Mbps LAN, the LAN is the bottleneck. With 1000Mbps LAN, the
drive is the bottleneck, but you're still carrying about 4 1/2 times more
data.

I'd rather have the hard drive as the bottleneck.

BTW, I plan to do most of my file transfers from a RAID 1 setup, which
gives the fastest sequential read speed.

Oh well, since I can't find what I'm looking for (at least in the consumer
space anyway, I'm sure solutions exist in the server market) I suppose
I'll just get a really thin PCI Gigabit LAN card instead. I'll chop a bit
off the metal bracket at the front, and should hopefully manage to squeeze
it in.

If you really care about ethernet performance then make sure that you get
a card that has some sort of IP acceleration, the cheap cards aren't going
to do much a whole lot better than a 100T card (maybe 300MBits/second but
certainly not 1000MBits/second). The ethernet MAC in the Nforce4 does
have IP acceleration support and it is capable of delivering near wire
speeds. Instead of compromising your motherboard why don't you just get a
decent case?

 

[Cal Vanize]

60 Megabytes / sec = 480 Megabits / sec.

So, with 100Mbps LAN, the LAN is the bottleneck.
With 1000Mbps LAN, the drive is the bottleneck, but you're still
carrying about 4 1/2 times more data.

Megabits not megabytes. You made that speed mistake earlier and came to
the wrong conclusios regarding bandwidth utilization.

I'm doing a file transfer as I write this and am getting 56 megabits per
second rate based on the read speed of the server and the write speed of
the hard drive at the client.

Fact is that ALL hard drives are much slower then their advertised 100,
133, 150 or 300 megabit per second transfer rate. The fastest barely
cracks 70 megabits per second sustained.

See http://www20.tomshardware.com/2005/09/27/round/ for supporting data.

Therefore, a gigabit LAN doesn't do ANYTHING for performance since the
bottleneck is INSIDE the server or client

Check to see if you currently have noetwork contention and address that
problem. It might be as simple as swapping out an ethernet hub for an
ethernet switch.

I'd rather have the hard drive as the bottleneck.

BTW, I plan to do most of my file transfers from a RAID 1 setup, which
gives the fastest sequential read speed.

I hate to burst your balloon, but that's not correct. RAID 1 is no
faster than a single drive and in real-world applications may actually
be a little slower. RAID 0 provides a speed improvement of up to about
60% which pumps it up to about 100 megabits INTERNAL transfer rates.
The make and model of the drives being used in RAID 0 will impact the
speed of the array. A pair of 80gb WD SATA drives in RAID 0 will not
perform as well as a pair of 160gb WD PATA drives in RAID 0.

Physics is just working against you when you move from theory to real
world applications with fragmented files. Its dooubtful whether you'll
actually see a sustained transfer rate greater than 100 megabits per
second into our out of your computer except for very short bursts from a
drive buffer.

 

[Asfand Yar Qazi]

If you really care about ethernet performance then make sure that you get
a card that has some sort of IP acceleration, the cheap cards aren't going
to do much a whole lot better than a 100T card (maybe 300MBits/second but
certainly not 1000MBits/second). The ethernet MAC in the Nforce4 does
have IP acceleration support and it is capable of delivering near wire
speeds. Instead of compromising your motherboard why don't you just get a
decent case?

It's not a matter of getting a decent case... its a matter of getting a decent
case that's small. Those cost bucket-loads. But, I think I just might get
one anyway... it'll be worth it in the long term. I suppose I'll go for a
nforce 4 4x mATX jobby then, which has, according to you, "proper" Gbit lan.

 

[mk]

Megabits not megabytes. You made that speed mistake earlier and came to
the wrong conclusios regarding bandwidth utilization.

I'm doing a file transfer as I write this and am getting 56 megabits per
second rate based on the read speed of the server and the write speed of
the hard drive at the client.

Fact is that ALL hard drives are much slower then their advertised 100,
133, 150 or 300 megabit per second transfer rate. The fastest barely
cracks 70 megabits per second sustained.

See http://www20.tomshardware.com/2005/09/27/round/ for supporting data.

I think it's you who is confused. On this page
http://www20.tomshardware.com/2005/09/27/round/page35.html
it shows that the minimum read speed of the slowest drive is 25 MB/s
ie 150 Mb/s. Good ard drive read channels are doing around 500 Mb/s
these days. The fastest drive on this list has an average read speed
of 63 MB/s or around 500 Mb/s.

 

[Cal Vanize]

I think it's you who is confused. On this page
http://www20.tomshardware.com/2005/09/27/round/page35.html
it shows that the minimum read speed of the slowest drive is 25 MB/s
ie 150 Mb/s. Good ard drive read channels are doing around 500 Mb/s
these days. The fastest drive on this list has an average read speed
of 63 MB/s or around 500 Mb/s.

Not exactly.

I think you need to read it again. The rates to which you refer cannot
be attained through the drive interface. Therefore its all stated in
megabits.

 

[mk]

Not exactly.

I think you need to read it again. The rates to which you refer cannot
be attained through the drive interface. Therefore its all stated in
megabits.

Look at this page:
http://www20.tomshardware.com/2005/09/27/round/page2.html and read the
second paragraph. When these benchmarks talk about MB/s it is
Mbytes/s. The interface ratings are also in Mega Bytes / second.
Serial ATA has an interface timing of 1.5 Gigabits per second ie 187.5
MB/s but with the coding overhead actual data rate is 150 Mbytes/s.
PATA is rated at 33 or 66 MHz at 16 bits per transfer or 66 to 132
Mbytes/s. The interface ratings are all above the actual data rates. I
think you're missing something here.

 

[Cal Vanize]

Look at this page:
http://www20.tomshardware.com/2005/09/27/round/page2.html and read the
second paragraph. When these benchmarks talk about MB/s it is
Mbytes/s. The interface ratings are also in Mega Bytes / second.
Serial ATA has an interface timing of 1.5 Gigabits per second ie 187.5
MB/s but with the coding overhead actual data rate is 150 Mbytes/s.
PATA is rated at 33 or 66 MHz at 16 bits per transfer or 66 to 132
Mbytes/s. The interface ratings are all above the actual data rates. I
think you're missing something here.

I think the part I've missed is that all the rates are stated in bytes,
not bits. My misunderstanding.

That being the case, the whole scenario changes. I might even try
gigabit LAN to see what difference it makes.

 

[General Schvantzkoph]

It's not a matter of getting a decent case... its a matter of getting a
decent case that's small. Those cost bucket-loads. But, I think I just
might get one anyway... it'll be worth it in the long term. I suppose
I'll go for a nforce 4 4x mATX jobby then, which has, according to you,
"proper" Gbit lan.

That's the right thing to do. You don't want to compromise your system
performance because of a box. There are a lot of small cases out there
that ought to be able to meet most of your requirements and not force you
to give up the performance features that are important to you.