Lan Art 10Mbps Hub - 24 port - Good for Lan Games?

[VR46]

Hello,

I have a LanArt 10 Base T 24 Port Hub here. Its quite old and I have never used it.

I was wondering, although this hub is not 10/100 it should work a treat for Lan games?

Itr also has Fibre Optic connectors at the back, obviously I wont be using those hehe

What do ya reckon?

[peterb]

Probably - try it and see!

[TheAnimus]

well, for only 24 players it should be okay, even if you have to uplink, 10mbit should be okay for just 24 people playing any game (10k/sec is a nice overhead).

but if people transfer files (patches/maps) then everyone will suffer greatly.

[unrealrocks]

Same as what TheAnimus said ... it will be fine for just gaming as thats not hugely bandwidth heavy but because its a hub and not a switch if one person starts file sharing over it everyone will slow to a halt (and file sharing over 10MBps is slow anyways, lol).

[Moby-Dick]

Indeed - a switch would be preferable for more than a few players. If you get really large then a switch with some management capabilities would be even better ( gives you some control over the type of traffic going over the switch )

[TheAnimus]

indeed traffic shaping for a LAN party is quite simple, TCP low, UDP high.

but if you do go for a switch, theres no point getting a cheapy slow proccessor one. HUBs are fine at lans as long as no ones filesharing etc. because most 100mbit switches that are unmanaged cheapie things, have a max throuput of 800mbit.

combined with the arogance present in most users of computers who like to think they know it all, see 100mbit connection and think "oh it won't hurt" but a nice 10mbit makes it slow and painful for anyone who tries.

[5lab]

i would think a 10mbit hub might get bottlenecked pretty easily - i would reccomend either a 10mbit switch, or 100mbit hub (or, better still, a 100mbit switch)

[TheAnimus]

5lab, not for a games server.

its all going to one port really, so it dosen't matter than its not a switch.

edit: you do get about 2ms less on a cat say, because there are lots and lots and lots of tiny packets. Its not the same as big data packets with lots of delivery options. UDP is mostly used (which isn't "intact recipt ensured" like TCP).

[Paul Adams]

LAN games aren't as much about bandwidth as they are latency.
I've played LAN games on Windows 95 using a coaxial cable dasiy-chained between 4 machines at 10Mbps and that worked just fine (showing my age now).

A bigger issue than a bottleneck caused by bandwidth is that a hub is a single collision domain, so you are guaranteed some packet loss when using UDP but way less than I would expect a game to consider a problem.

So, as has been pointed out, as long as you don't get 1 of the computers eating all the bandwidth with a massive file transfer you should be fine.

[peterb]

So the bottom line is - yes it will work, probably not the latest and greatest, but since you have it, you might as well try it out and see if it does do what you want it to...