Onboard Gigabit-Ethernet Scramble

[gaoptimize]

Hi,
I was very interested in that article, but disappointed
that the new approach on the NForce3:

http://www.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20040420/nforce3_250gb-03.html

was not benchmarked. But I was also disappointed that a LANParty benchmark was not run. I wonder how well THG is equipped to run benchmarks on multiple machines simultaneously. I would have put a high end graphics card in each of the gigabit-ethernet equipped machines, loaded Quake, hooked them all into a gigabit switch, and done a frames per second test to see if the performance and CPU usage made a difference. A complicated matter normalizing out the other effects, but THG is clever.

One more thing: In MidTown Madness, I notice that the performance increases noticably if I go into the Win2K task manager and set the priority of the task to "High". Do you guys ever do this when you do game benchmarks on hardware?

Thanks for Tom's Hardware! I don't make a purchase without it.

-Tom Schaefer

 

[etp777]

Would have been interesting to have the Nforce in there too, but at least to me, as I was reading it, seemed one of primary interests of article was whether PCI held back Gigabit Ethernet, and whether the Intel solution(who's acronym slips my mind right now) to remove it from the PCI bus helped bypass this problem.

Definitely an interesting article. My 3com 940 didn't perform too well, but as all it does is connect to a 3c905 in my linux box via crossover cable(and my linux box is rarely on), I'm not worried too much. Still good to know. And supports my positive views on Intel PCi ethernet cards for performance needs.

 

[TheRod]

The problem with this article is that anyone knows that Intel NIC are very fast, but they are expensive...

The other point is that nForce3 250Gb was not considered, I think this article focused on Intel based system. They should have mention it at the beginning of the article or at least talk about the nForce 250Gb performance, this integrated GigE controller is very fast.

But THG main public is not IT specialist, so they don't bother or focus on high-end benchmarking. Because realworld use of GigE cards are in files/database/FTP/HTTP servers. It's cool for PC fanatics to know that some cards can transfer files really fast between PC, but, GigE NIC is yet a buzzword for gamers and normal users, we never "suck" that much bandwidth with our SATE/EIDE drives or with our multiplayer games.

--
Lookin' to fill that <font color=blue>GOD</font color=blue> shape hole!