Gigabit Network speed?

[pgudge]

Hello all,

I just bought a Edimax 8port Gigabit switch and 4 Edimax gigabit NICs (32Bit PCI) Installed with drivers fine, 3 Windows XP machines and a Windows 2003 Server machine. All show Local Connection to be 1.0Gbps

In SiSoft Sandra the 1000BaseT PCI is showing as 54MB/s, and 100BaseT PCI at 10MB/s. With my 3Com 10/100 I was getting around 8/9MB/s which was fine, but the Edimax cards are showing as 28MB/s at best.

From one Windows XP Machine with SiSoft Sandra on the Windows XP machines are comming up at about 24MB/s to 28MB/s, the Windows 2003 machine never goes above 24MB/s.

Is there something else I need to configure? All motherboards are 2.1/2.2 compliant etc. etc.

Thanks

FYI:
Asus P4S8X, P4 2.4GHz, Windows XP Pro
ECS DV6AA, 2xP3 1GHz, Windows XP Pro
Gigabye GA-6BXD, 2xP2 450MHz, Windows 2003 Server
All Cat5e, and Edimax switch shows connections at 1000 speed.

[Curly]

I seem to remember the same problem of slowdown occurring at a lan I was at, not 100% sure but I think it was down to the Jumbo frames setting in the drivers, make sure the nic's are all set the same in the drivers, I could be wrong though.

Curly

[arthurleung]

I get 32MB/s on my setup:
Jumboframe off
Comp1 3Com 3C940 (32/33)
Switch Dell Powerconnect 2616
Comp2 BroadcomNetXtreme (32/33)
I believe it is a harddrive problem.

[pgudge]

Jumbo Frames Disabled too, SATA150 in one machine ATA100 in the other, so is ~30MB/s the best I can expect?

According to SiSoft (let me just say I am using SiSoft to just get an indication of what I should/could be getting) to acheive ~54MB/s I need to either be using SCSI U320, or RAID0 ATA100 drives to get that sort of throughput.

My SATA is giving about 54MB/s and the other machines ATA100 is giving about 33MB/s which would confirm that to a tee. Thanks arthurleung, never thourght about looking there.

better start looking for some cheap RAID0 drives for the boot drives for these machines

Thanks again.

[Rave]

That's likely to be your problem. Bear in mind also that there's an overhead involved in using the PCI bus; PCI Gigabit NICs (whether built into the motherboard or an add-in card) never seem to get over about 700Mb/s even when everything else is optimal. It's also possible (I think?) that your hard disks hang off the PCI bus, which eats a big chunk of the total available bandwidth right there.