LAN Party Troubles

[levski]

We are palnning a 60man lan party and we are wondering what swiches to use.

is the 100mb ethernet speed a bottleneck for such highspeed carnage?

 

[Buzzons]

well if you have a decent non blocking switch with more than 60 ports (which may be hard) then no it will not be a bottle neck.

However you will probably find that you will end up with 2 48 port switches, if they are managed, bind some ports to give it a better throughput between the two switches. you will probably have 30 PCs per switch, so thats 3gigabit that you would want between the switches.. so look for switches that have at least 2 (best to go for 4) gigabit ports on as well, linksys,dell, and netgear do some very good 48 port switches that have 4 gigabit slots on. (they also sometimes come wtih fiber ports, which wold allow you to have the switches further than 100m apart)

For the actual BW : no, 100mbit is fine for gamers to playon so long as the switches you use are as i said, non blocking (have a backbone 2x the size of the number of ports)