What is the benefit of Gibabit Ethernet on motherboards?

[Salvador]

I'm looking at two different motherboards and one comes with Gigabit Ethernet and the other doesn't. What's the significance of it? Does it improve the speeds of the internet or is it just for computers on your network? If it's just for computers on your network, do you have to have Gigabit on all of them to even make a difference?

I didn't know whether to ask this question in networking or general hardware.

TIA,

Sal

 

[skyking]

Originally posted by: Salvador
I'm looking at two different motherboards and one comes with Gigabit Ethernet and the other doesn't. What's the significance of it? Does it improve the speeds of the internet or is it just for computers on your network? If it's just for computers on your network, do you have to have Gigabit on all of them to even make a difference?

I didn't know whether to ask this question in networking or general hardware.

TIA,

Sal

That's it. The internet will not be any faster with gigibit, and you would need a gigabit switch and a server or other computers with gigabit to share large files with.
If you ever planned on setting up a home network and moving large video files, I'd recommend it.

 

[Salvador]

I'm assuming that I could buy a Gigabit PCI card then just like I used to have to do before the motherboards were coming with onboard Ethernet.

Can you use the Gigabit Ethernet even though you wouldn't reach the faster speeds without the rest of the equipment? I'm asking because the particular motherboard that I'm looking at has a regular Ethernet plug and then a Gigabit plug on the motherboard.

Do you run the switch off of the router? I have a Buffalo G wifi router at the moment.

 

[JackMDS]

Home Giga Network: http://www.ezlan.net/giga.html

Giga networking - http://www.ezlan.net/giga_net.html

 

[Salvador]

Thanks for the info. I don't think it's going to work for me anyway with my setup. I only have two rooms next to each other wired and the rest of the house is running on wifi. The way that I handle transferring large files now is with an external firewire hdd. I just load the file on the hdd and plug it into the other pc that I want the file transferred to. I can see where the Gigabit would be really useful in a business setting, but I just don't see it being a huge benefit for personal use.

So, to answer my question. I don't think I need to worry about Gigabit on the motherboard at this point. Thanks.

I'm still unclear about one last thing though. If I had the Gigabit switch on the motherboard and my Ethernet switch died on me, could the Gigabit double as a regular Ethernet or is it incompatible with regular Ethernet?

 

[JackMDS]

Switch on Motherboard???

These Giga NICs are Ethernet 1000/100/10. I.e they can work with any regular Ethernet Network.

 

[Modelworks]

The gigabit ethernet will auto fall back to the next lower speed that works.

 

[Salvador]

Originally posted by: JackMDS
Switch on Motherboard???

I meant port on the motherboard and not switch.

 

[Kelemvor]

How much is the price difference between the boards? If it's negligible, might as well get the Gig since that's where everything is headed. ANd who knows when you might upgrade the other PC and want to throw in a router/switch to move files.

 

[Sunner]

Out of curiosity, what kind of motherboard doesn't have GigE these days?
I think the last three motherboards I've bought all had Gig...

 

[Salvador]

Originally posted by: Sunner
Out of curiosity, what kind of motherboard doesn't have GigE these days?
I think the last three motherboards I've bought all had Gig...

Socket 754 system.

 

[JackMDS]

Hmm,., You can always upgrade to Giga card, it is only $10 but you can Not upgrade a 754 Mobo.

Put the extra money in a more modrern Mobo.

 

[Salvador]

Originally posted by: JackMDS
Hmm,., You can always upgrade to Giga card, it is only $10 but you can Not upgrade a 754 Mobo.

Put the extra money in a more modrern Mobo.

It's for a cpu that I already have. Plus, the mobo is dirt cheap anyway. I was more curious about Gigabit Ethernet than anything.

 

[HVAC]

I found a need for gigabit in my home network because trying to watch a video file on my desktop computer that was hosted on my server became a jittery mess due to the number of users (wife and 7 kids).

I got a decent jumbo frame capable switch and some intel PCI-E gigabit cards and I hit 950kbps+ in short bursts. I certainly cannot sustain anywhere near that rate with large files.

I couldn't do it with off the shelf PCI gigbit cards and certainly not with motherboard builtin gignics. Normal PCI didn't have the bandwidth and the motherboard NICs were either bandwidth choked on the PCI bus or were like winmodems and slow as sin.

Frankly my video file woes may have had more to do with the latency and bandwidth issues inherent with use of consumer level 4 port firewall/routers, but I did what I did.

 

[Eos]

Originally posted by: HVAC
I found a need for gigabit in my home network because trying to watch a video file on my desktop computer that was hosted on my server became a jittery mess due to the number of users (wife and 7 kids).

I got a decent jumbo frame capable switch and some intel PCI-E gigabit cards and I hit 950kbps+ in short bursts. I certainly cannot sustain anywhere near that rate with large files.

I couldn't do it with off the shelf PCI gigbit cards and certainly not with motherboard builtin gignics. Normal PCI didn't have the bandwidth and the motherboard NICs were either bandwidth choked on the PCI bus or were like winmodems and slow as sin.

Frankly my video file woes may have had more to do with the latency and bandwidth issues inherent with use of consumer level 4 port firewall/routers, but I did what I did.

I had the same need.

Computers feed the home theater computer via a gigabit LAN. Main computers have separate gigabit onboard and PCI and the HTPC has onboard gigabit. They all connect to an 8 port giga switch and the clients have static IPs.

I can get transfers as fast as 1.2 gigabytes per minute. So almost two cds of data per minute. Works for me.

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: HVAC
I got a decent jumbo frame capable switch and some intel PCI-E gigabit cards and I hit 950kbps+ in short bursts. I certainly cannot sustain anywhere near that rate with large files.

I couldn't do it with off the shelf PCI gigbit cards and certainly not with motherboard builtin gignics. Normal PCI didn't have the bandwidth and the motherboard NICs were either bandwidth choked on the PCI bus or were like winmodems and slow as sin.

Frankly my video file woes may have had more to do with the latency and bandwidth issues inherent with use of consumer level 4 port firewall/routers, but I did what I did.

FWIW, I've exceeded 100 MB/s (800 Mb/s, 6 GB/m) for very large Windows file transfers across two on-board GbE NICs (an Intel sending to an nVIDIA) using all consumer stuff and without jumbo frames. Pure network tests regularly sustain > 900 Mb/s with such setups.

While it's tempting to think that if you don't get great file transfer performance when you go to gigabit it's because of something at the network level, esp. the NIC, that's often not the case. OTOH, sometimes the NIC is to blame, but I find that the degree to which the NIC is to blame is often exaggerated.