KVR Audio

chagzuki · Post by **chagzuki** » Sat Jun 05, 2004 9:57 am

I figure it's time to try this. I've seen a D-Link gigabit card at ebuyer for about £20. And as far as I can tell I need a cat6 cable (?).

I see in the cable description that it's also for 100mbps base-T network cards. Does this mean that like a proper prat I've been slowing my current network down with a cat5 cable?

Any advice? Do all cards have similar performance? Is there any reason to avoid low-priced cards?

McLilith · Post by **McLilith** » Sat Jun 05, 2004 10:37 am

chagzuki wrote:I see in the cable description that it's also for 100mbps base-T network cards. Does this mean that like a proper prat I've been slowing my current network down with a cat5 cable?

Yes, you need cat 6 (category 6) cable for a gigabit ethernet setup. The cat 6 cable will also work on the slower 100 mbps networks, if you really wanted to use it on one. For that matter, it will even work on the slower 10mbps networks, but I digress.

A cat 5 cable is the minimum requirement for 100 mbps ethernet. If you put a cat 6 cable on your 100 mbps network, it will function perfectly, but you will not see any speed gains from just the cable upgrade. Assuming you currently have 100 mbps ethernet cards and cat 5 cable, you are doing fine.

The only real upgrade to consider is to change all your network cards to gigabit cards, all your cables to cat 6 cable, and make sure that any routers, switches, gateways, etc on your network can also handle the gigabit speeds. This all needs to be matched, if you want the maximum speed.

I hope that helps some.

later,
McLilith

chagzuki · Post by **chagzuki** » Sat Jun 05, 2004 11:42 am

Yes, thanks, that clears things up. This issue for me is how much of a performance improvement I can get from FXteleport, because with my current cards it's just not worth using.

McLilith · Post by **McLilith** » Sat Jun 05, 2004 12:01 pm

That's hard for me to give you an accurate answer about. I can only tell you that gigabit ethernet is 10 times faster than 100 mbps ethernet, but I assume you already figured that out.

When it comes to FXteleport, it's hard to say with certainty whether your network speed is the bottleneck in performance. If you are only using your network for FXteleport and nothing else, I would expect a dramatic increase in efficiency when switching to gigabit ethernet. If you are currently experiencing latency or lost data, the switch to gigabit might be just what you need.

If you have several other programs using your network, or perhaps several other computers transfering a lot of data which is totally unrelated to FXteleport, then your situation gets much more complicated. Not even gigabit can handle everything you could possibly want to transfer across a network. I would suggest using a dedicated network connection between the machines using FXteleport, if you haven't done that already.

If you're thinking of spending a lot of money on hardware upgrades, I would suggest contacting the FXteleport people and ask for some advice from them.

DevonB · Post by **DevonB** » Sat Jun 05, 2004 12:55 pm

Also remember a higher CPU overhead for Gigabit ethernet too. Look at this one card that's sucking down 50-60% CPU on good systems.

http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php? ... pn=SP2612R

..under Customer Reviews.

Cat 5e also does gigabit, but 5e isn't built as 'stringent' as 6 and isn't as stringent as cat7.

Remember, all cat3/4/5/6/7 wiring is 4 pairs of wires, just wrapped more times per foot than the one previous to it to avoid crosstalk on the wire.

Devon

chagzuki · Post by **chagzuki** » Sat Jun 05, 2004 1:01 pm

DevonB wrote:Also remember a higher CPU overhead for Gigabit ethernet too. Look at this one card that's sucking down 50-60% CPU on good systems.
Devon

That defeats the whole purpose. Bugger.

gigabit networking