Network cards and CPU usage

strat

Ok, I'm at a LAN and I'm uploading steadily at 8 megs a sec, this usually hits the cpu for about 20% - making most of the games im playing at the time unplayable, recently I've been setting up FTP servers that I can turn on and off when playing games etc but it dosent solve the problem.

The nic is a cheap Realtec based one which i assume is to blame? What kind of nic would help here or is it the nature of the beast?

spongebob

try an intel pro or a 3com , they have very good drivers for all OS's

your realtek may run better with a more mature driver, the realtek 8029 driver is well tried and may work better

M

strat

Thanks muck il try drivers, any particular model numebrs of intel pro/3 com i shood look out for/avoid. I hear some of them have onboard processors ?

im on xp pro with an abit kg7-raid and an xp2100 btw

spongebob

no health warnings that I can think of bar that POS 3C900 cards which is a cheap 10mBIT only 3com card.

another cheapie such as an SMC card may work as well but 20% processor load implies a badly written driver IMO .

M

sutty

Its also hard drive access (read/write) when your transfering the files your hard drive is being used, thus taking up CPU cycles. The reason the games play so badly is that its at a high priortiy on the system. While a good card will help. you will always get this.

As far as cards go, I like anything with a intel
pro chipset, 81550 or something like that (cant remember at the moment)

strat

thanks for the info lads
looking around komplett and is this one of these intel cards your on about sutty ?

sceptre

Adding to Muck's warning...

I'd stay away from 3com 509 cards as well - can be a lot of trouble to set up

All the 905 series are quite good though.

longword

Originally posted by sceptre
stay away from 3com 509 cards as well - can be a lot of trouble to set up

Nonsense. The only thing wrong with 3c509s is the fact that they're ISA cards.

spongebob

...operates in broadcast mode, ouch .

the 905 family is very good but they cost €50 as compared to half that or less for Realtek/SMC / D-link / Linksys cheapos.

The cheapos are great if they work (first time )but I would always put a 3Com or an Intel in a server........

M

po0k

If you read this and take nothing else away, take this:
DOn't go near linksys nics.
Iv'e had nothing but heartache with them at lans. I've had hassle with one intel card but it was an oem job and I think we had to make do with a "general purpose" driver too.
I ahve to say that Realteks,while cheap, cheerful and pretty much work in anything ever built - ever aren't all tha fast.
I've got a 3Com atm, a 905C-TX-M, cost me €50, and tbh, it's the one of the few purchases for this box I'm truely happy with.
I've spent well over taht collectively on previous nics (went from a RTL8029AS -> 3Com595(no win2k driver though - no FD @ 100Mbit) -> Realtek8139) and I don't think I'll ever need another nic for this box till I go gigabit (and even then that'd be a waste on this box ).

sutty

Sorry man, didn't look at the tread till now, aye thats one with the good intel chipset.

Rew

Realtek cards tend to drop packets and cause more collision on the wire, they are the worst chip set going. But they re cheap and they do work 99% of the time. If u go to a lot of lans or put heavy trafic on your own LAN u should get a 3Com or equivlent

elexes

been using intel cards for the last year there very good . i dont see mutch wrong with the cheep ones considering your only paying about €12 so what do you expect if you want preformance you do have to spend the cash

also it was said that hdd access speeds have a lot to do with this id totaly agree also go to say that the hdd will mater more then the actuall nic but feel free to say im wrong

strat

looks like il have to get me self some scsi drives then

looks like i might be able to get a second hand 905C-TX-M for €18 so il looks into that

thanks for the advice

rob1891

Modern ide harddrive will out do a 100Mb card and some:



That's sustained data transfer rates across the entire range of the 180GB disk. It goes from ~56MB/sec to ~23MB/sec. (The disk is an IBM DeskStar.)

Your 100Mb nic will only do 12.5MB/sec. Bytes and Bits, don't get your selves confuzzeled!

Rob

edit: I should probably mention those are read transfer speeds, write speeds are slower 40MB/sec to 15MB/sec, still beating your network card ....

elexes

yes but when your transfering files and playing a game at the same time what would the game play like ?

if the file transfer was limited lower still it would play well but not when both r trying to get as mutch speed from the computer and they can ?

yet again if im wrong pls tell me its the only way ill learn

rob1891

As far as the game + file transfer, two transfers would halve the transfer rate for each file, so I'd imagine it would be the same for the game too? So provided your game doesn't need more than 1/2 the bandwidth of the NIC then there would be no network degredation.

However IDE harddrives are crap with multiple reads/writes and with not eating CPU cycles, SCSI puts these operations onto a queue of some sort and does not hold up the processor with interrupts. That would be where the advantage of having a SCSI system would be, but it has nothing to do with the network, SCSI is always going to be better in a multitasking environment, transfer a file from one disk to another whilst playing halflife and watch your frame rate drop

rob

ps: none of this is from experience, just numbers ... except the halflife and transfer thing, i tried that out

sutty

Again, I say its down t CPU usage from the hard drive access. As for saying Ian is wrong.... YOUR WRONG... but only cause I want to say your wrong.

rob1891

lol, I completely missed the point of the thread, expaining the game slow down whilst ftping, which was done ages ago!

duh duh duh, sorry all. I thought for some reason the argument was hdd or nic slowing the transfer rate (not game).

On those tom's hardware reviews they give test data for cpu utilisation, of course they used a pretty neat system, P4 2Ghz, never the less:



SCSI is an expensive jump if you buy new, you have the controller card + the drive, niether of which are cheap. Second hand you could get yourself up and running for under 100 with an old 40MB/sec card (what is that, Ultrawide I think) and small 4.5/9gig (by todays ide standards) drive.

What about the poor sods you are downloading from though! You'll be scsi and not notice any performance hit whilst their fps will die (....hmmm, good plan!)

rob