NIC Card question. (1 Viewer)

[Parker Clack]

I have a 10/100 NIC card in my system now and I was wondering if I should be able to swap this out with a 10/100/1000 NIC with no problems. What do I want to get? I have seen that they average around $29 for one but then they also run up to $100 for what appears to be the same card from the same company. Why the difference in price?

I am maxing out at the 100 Mbits/sec through my cable modem and they have speeds up to 500 Mbits/sec available through the modem. My next question is if I get a 10/100/1000 NIC and replace my existing one will I be able to get the max bit rate through this new card at whatever the cable modem can deliver or are there other limiting factors?

I have an HP PC that is hooked up through a Linksys router hub to my cable modem.

Any info on these would be appreciated.

Thanks

 

[Patrick Sun]

I'm guessing that you have to have also mate a 10/100/1000 cable modem/router hub with a 10/100/1000 NIC for the cable modem connection to see more than 100mbs.

 

[SethH]

Please forgive my questioning, but are you completely sure about that cable modem speed? I've never heard of cable modem speeds above 10Mbits. Even the new Verizon FIOS service tops out at about 15Mbits.

 

[Jeff Blair]

You might be getting 500kbs. That sounds more the norm. Either way, you will have to get a gigabit router for you to see any of the speed increase. If you just have the gigabit card, then you will still be limited to the 10/100 of your router. If you have more then one PC that you are moving files to, then you need to get 2 cards, and a new router/switch.

 

[Parker Clack]

What router/hub would you recommend?

 

[SethH]

The cheapest would probably be Linksys (check out their business stuff). If you've got money to toss around, look at Cisco.

 

[Scott L]

You should have more than enough bandwidth for cable internets. Did you need Gigabit for transferring files at home?

 

[Ken Chan]

Just to be clear, 500 kilo-bytes per second sounds right for cable modem. That's only 4 mega-bits.

You can check if you're saturating your NIC pretty easily with Windows XP. Open the Task Manager (easiest way is to right-click a blank part of the Taskbar and choose from that menu). There's a Networking tab that shows current network utilization. Download something big.

 

[Christian Behrens]

That's the exact same reason why wireless 802.11b is absolutely sufficient for connecting to the Internet. Only when you need to transfer files between computers at home will 802.11g come in handy.

-Christian

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

And the reason why my ISP doesn't support the "g" version of my combo DSL/Gateway/Firewall/Wireless router. It doesn't make their DSL any faster, and they don't think most of their customers are sophisticated enough to do high-speed transfers between computers, so why train their guys on new stuff that hardly anyone will order. The manufacturer only sells through ISPs and I really don't want to go through the hassle of trying to add another wireless access point and/or router to the network, so I'm stuck for the time being.





Joe

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

I've recently become a firm convert to running Smoothwall on a cheap PC box for my firewall/broadband router. Excellent performance, features and it's free as long as you have an old PC to run it on. Installation is childishly simple, too, and management is via a web interface.

With a few modifications that you can find on the official bulletin board you can even do fun stuff like QoS to control just how your bandwidth is used, etc.

Beats any SOHO router box hands down, but of course, the rub is having an old PC with two NIC's basically laying around to run it on to keep the costs down.

Wireless also has to be bought separately in the form of an access point.

I went with this setup after my old cheapo router failed and I lost both the firewall and the wireless connectivity in one fell swoop...

 

[Jeff Blair]

Ahh yes, Linux is a great thing. That is another option for you. You could get a normail 10/100 for the internet, and a 10/100/1000 for the internal network. There are a couple of programs that will do that on Liux. IPTables comes to mind. And, you can have a web interface for it as well. I have never used it, so I don't know how hard it is to set it up.

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

Smoothwall (or IPCop, which branced out from Smoothwall and went its own but similar way) really doesn't show the Linux roots much at all unless you start digging "under the hood"... all you see in day-to-day use is a web interface just like any firewall-router.

Plain Linux is great as a firewall too, but a bit of a pain to maintain and configure; not so these dedicated distributions. You get a solid firewall, web proxy to speed up surfing, dhcp server to serve IP addresses to your computers inside the firewall, intrusion detection, VPN... all installed pretty much for you automagically and easily configured via a web page.

 

[Parker Clack]

Thanks for all the information guys. Looks like I will sticking with what I've got.