Todays Routers and Gigabyte ethernet

I'm going to want to upgrade to Gigabyte lan sometime over the next few
years and was considering buying a router now. If i bought a router now, say
the vigor 2600 (which I believe supports 100mb/sec lan) is there any way in
which I can take advantage of the bandwidth of gigabyte lan while still
using this router or would I need to ditch it?

One guess. Perhaps the router could feed a gigabyte ethernet switch giving
internet connectivity and gigabyte lan for the PC's?! Although this would
leave 3 ports unused perhaps it would work?

TIA

tHatDudeUK

tHatDudeUK wrote:

> I'm going to want to upgrade to Gigabyte lan sometime over the next few
> years and was considering buying a router now. If i bought a router now,
> say the vigor 2600 (which I believe supports 100mb/sec lan) is there any
> way in which I can take advantage of the bandwidth of gigabyte lan while
> still using this router or would I need to ditch it?
>
> One guess. Perhaps the router could feed a gigabyte ethernet switch giving
> internet connectivity and gigabyte lan for the PC's?! Although this would
> leave 3 ports unused perhaps it would work?

That's about your only option. If you used the 100 meg ports on the back of
the vigor, you'd be limiting all machines to 100 meg. And, unless you're
using 64 bit PCI and other fun stuff, you probably won't see the full
gigabit speed.

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"Duncan Hill" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:3fd70982$0$26538$(E-Mail Removed).. .
> That's about your only option. If you used the 100 meg ports on the back
of
> the vigor, you'd be limiting all machines to 100 meg. And, unless you're
> using 64 bit PCI and other fun stuff, you probably won't see the full
> gigabit speed.

I'm thinking of getting one of the revised Nforce2 mobos with Gigabyte lan
built in if they ever release them... (They might just focus on the Nforce3
for AMD FX which would be a shame as many issues are unresolved with this
board I feel.) I'd imagine since it's built into the southbridge (or should
be) I would see benefit of the full speed?!

Just out of interest, what's the effective speed of 100 lan between say 3
machines. One as server say serving multicast video?

tHatDudeUK wrote:

>
> "Duncan Hill" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
> news:3fd70982$0$26538$(E-Mail Removed).. .
>> That's about your only option. If you used the 100 meg ports on the back
> of
>> the vigor, you'd be limiting all machines to 100 meg. And, unless you're
>> using 64 bit PCI and other fun stuff, you probably won't see the full
>> gigabit speed.
>
> I'm thinking of getting one of the revised Nforce2 mobos with Gigabyte lan
> built in if they ever release them... (They might just focus on the
> Nforce3 for AMD FX which would be a shame as many issues are unresolved
> with this board I feel.) I'd imagine since it's built into the southbridge
> (or should be) I would see benefit of the full speed?!

IIRC, onboard NICs are still PCI - they're just a chip connected via the PCI
bus. All that's missing is the riser slot.

> Just out of interest, what's the effective speed of 100 lan between say 3
> machines. One as server say serving multicast video?

On a switched connection, each link from switch to NIC is 100 meg. It may
even be 100 meg full duplex (simultaneous 100 meg in each direction).

The effective speed of a multicast video is limited by the speed at which
the multicasting machine can read the data from drive/memory and feed it to
the network card. You could saturate a 100 meg link, but I'd wonder what
you were broadcasting at that point. Dummy numbers say that a 100 megabit
LAN will transfer 10 megabytes of data every second (real numbers are a bit
different). Gigabit dummy numbers ramp that to 100 megabytes every second.

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On Wed, 10 Dec 2003 11:52:23 -0000, "tHatDudeUK"
<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>I'm going to want to upgrade to Gigabyte lan sometime over the next few
>years and was considering buying a router now.

IMHO You're wasting your time with gig-e unless you buy a L3 switch which
supports vlans and jumbo frames.


You have to partition off standard and fast ethernet from the gigabit
traffic.

Otherwise with the equivalent of 15 byte 10baseT frame size, gig-e will
swamp both sender and reciever with interrupts. The same issue applies to
the cheap mickey mouse gig-e switches which are currently on the market.

What are you conceivably doing that would require sustained data xfer >
9-10 megabytes/sec anyway ?


greg
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"Greg Hennessy" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> What are you conceivably doing that would require sustained data xfer >
> 9-10 megabytes/sec anyway ?

Thinking of TV sharing using www.nebula-electronics.com , filesharing and
internet sharing over the network so essentially I'll have a file server and
a TV server.

I'd guess 100mb/sec is quite enough anyway, I guess I should be worried
about how slow wireless set-ups are :-)

On Wed, 10 Dec 2003 15:47:03 -0000, "tHatDudeUK"
<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:



>
>Thinking of TV sharing using www.nebula-electronics.com , filesharing and
>internet sharing over the network so essentially I'll have a file server and
>a TV server.
>
>I'd guess 100mb/sec is quite enough anyway, I guess I should be worried
>about how slow wireless set-ups are :-)
>
I've done a bit of video streaming over 100M, and IME the limits are
imposed by the processor power needed for encoding on the fly, the
network isn't a problem.

There is a USR WAP available (USR808054) which works at 100M to the
matching USR cards, 54M to other kit.

--
Niall

"tHatDudeUK" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:br71bu$1739$(E-Mail Removed)...
> I'm going to want to upgrade to Gigabyte lan sometime over the next few
> years and was considering buying a router now. If i bought a router now,
say
> the vigor 2600 (which I believe supports 100mb/sec lan) is there any way
in
> which I can take advantage of the bandwidth of gigabyte lan while still
> using this router or would I need to ditch it?

No, just connect a gigabyte switch to the router. As long as it is a
computer communicating with another on the gigabyte switch the Router won't
come into it, it will simply connect at 100mbs for a 0.5 (or max of 8mbs)
internet connection.
>
> One guess. Perhaps the router could feed a gigabyte ethernet switch giving
> internet connectivity and gigabyte lan for the PC's?! Although this would
> leave 3 ports unused perhaps it would work?

Yep should be fine.

Sam
>
> TIA
>
> tHatDudeUK
>
>
>


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In message <3fd70ed5$0$19800$(E-Mail Removed)>, Duncan Hill
<(E-Mail Removed)> writes
>The effective speed of a multicast video is limited by the speed at
>which the multicasting machine can read the data from drive/memory and
>feed it to the network card. You could saturate a 100 meg link, but
>I'd wonder what you were broadcasting at that point. Dummy numbers say
>that a 100 megabit LAN will transfer 10 megabytes of data every second
>(real numbers are a bit different). Gigabit dummy numbers ramp that to
>100 megabytes every second.

To expand on a comment by another poster, the actual speed you get with
gigabit is going to be dependant on disk and processor speed.

I've done some tests with bulk data transfers from one machine to
another. 100Mbs does indeed equate to roughly 10MB/s, however
implementing the 1Gbs LAN (straight through via a crossover cable) only
gave twice the throughput - not ten times. Its obviously going to depend
on your machines, but both of the ones I used were no slouches (2.4GHz
HT P4 with striped RAID and XP3200 with true ATA133 disk)

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* tHatDudeUK wrote:
> I'm going to want to upgrade to Gigabyte lan sometime over the next few
> years and was considering buying a router now. If i bought a router now, say
> the vigor 2600 (which I believe supports 100mb/sec lan) is there any way in
> which I can take advantage of the bandwidth of gigabyte lan while still
> using this router or would I need to ditch it?

> One guess. Perhaps the router could feed a gigabyte ethernet switch giving
> internet connectivity and gigabyte lan for the PC's?! Although this would
> leave 3 ports unused perhaps it would work?

That's giga*bit* not gigabyte. But yes, feed the router into a
gigabit switch, if you still have it, and run one port at 10/100Mbit
and the others at Gbit. It's not as if you'll likely *need* the Gbit
for the WAN connection any time soon!

--tim