Gigabit switches: price vs. performance data?

Inexpensive modern consumer GbE switches can give essentially wire-speed performance for at least single connections. If you need management features, it's no contest -- the managed switches will win in features; however, the dumb switch could win in raw performance in some cases, esp. at the low end (i.e. low end managed switch might not hit wire-speed with managed features enabled).

http://www.lsc-group.phys.uwm.edu/ [...] tperf.html

Nobody's going to benchmark every $25-$100 GbE switch, nor are the readers of rigorous networking tests really interested in the low end. Even in consumer-land, the benchmarks of $25-100 GbE switches in general wouldn't matter, because they'll be bottlenecked by their HD's, etc., etc., well before even a relatively poor switch's performance comes into play.

So I can't remark in general, but I can say that I've measured cheap GbE switch such as my D-Link DGS-1008D to give > 115 MB/s TCP/IP throughput using PCATTCP (without enabling jumbo frames).

So my "hard info" is that there's no necessary relationship between price and raw performance in dumb switches, at least for single connections, and you should check particular switches for yourself.