Agreed. but the point I was making is that the card may expect to be able to shift data into the PC's memory at speeds appropriate for the gigabit LAN, and a Win95 system would probably be relatively old, and slow.
Depending on the card and the motherboard bus handling, the two may not interface well. ( as was the case with the system I was mentioning where the loading at about 1/3 the theoretical maximum on the LAN caused the system to have problems handling the throughput, especially, as was evident in the system I was looking at, to and from other devices - hard disk and optical media) Collisions on the LAN are not a problem as they only require the data to be re-sent, reducing the overall card to memory rate. Slow feed from memory to the card should not be a problem, if the card will run properly at the slow bus speed. The area I would most expect problems to be likely is, providing the LAN & cards work, where the card will not function properly at slow bus speeds. That may be exacerbated if the packets on the LAN are large enough to fill the cards buffer before it has emptied it to the system memory. 'Cheap card' hints at small buffer and components less able to handle a wide range of frequencies (As per the system I was using, and that system had a, for then reasonably fast processor, but probably on a cheap motherboard) JimB ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gaffer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2006 10:27 PM Subject: Re: Gigabit Ethernet and Windows 95 > Hi James & James, > > On Thursday 19 January 2006 05:17, James Fadden wrote: > > At 06:22 PM 1/18/2006, you wrote: > > >Third consideration: > > >is the system - CPU, memory and bus speed adequate for the cards rated speed. > > > It turns out it has 33mhz PCI bus, which multiplied by 32 bits gives a bandwidth of 1Gigabit. So the PCI bus alone barely has the bandwidth to handle the card, assuming no overhead. Considering the other factors you mention, the system is almost certainly at or beyond its limits. > > > > >Consider that it will be trying to work at its expected minimum interface speed, regardless of the actual speed of data in/output over the connection. > > This isn't quite correct. The traffic flow out of the card will be > packets at the rate of 1Gbit sec. There two factors that will impact > flow of packets. One is any collisions between packets flowing on the > LAN, and the other is the time taken for the card to aquire and > assemble the data that it is given from the PCI bus. If there is only > one gigabit card in a system the traffic data rate will approximate the > speed of the card that it is talking to.! > -- ---------------------------------------- To Change your email Address for this list, send the following message: CHANGE WIN-HOME your_old_address your_new_address to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Note carefully that both old and new addresses are required.
