Gigabit network speeds

[tonyw]

There is a driver in alpha state and it has been released to beta testers, but it does not work well enough to release to the public.

[Raziel]

There is a driver in alpha state and it has been released to beta testers, but it does not work well enough to release to the public.

Ahh, thanks a lot for that bit of information, now i get ssolie's reply.


Ok, moving on then.


Is there any benefit (on our system) in using a PCI-e network card or is the speed gain brought in by the underlying driver (which may or may not be able to use that extra power)?

I understand that the conventional PCI bus is limited to a max of roughly 1000 MBit/s [1000:8=125 MB, with 133 MB being the max using a 32-bit/33 MHz connection], which does sound like it was perfect for a GigaBit ethernet card, weren't there also other cards draining the bandwidth.

PCI-e has a much higher bandwidth (in it's v1.x form [don't know which PCI-e version NEMO uses] and using only the x1 connector it's nearly twice as fast. With the x16 plug it even maxes out at 4 GB/s.

And having "only" a gfx card plugged to that bus it sounds like a sensible idea to let the ethernet data run through the PCI-e bus...

All this was taken from wikipedia, though