Motherboard nic speed difference

[The JoJo]

Has anyone here used the Asus P4C800-E and Asus PC-DL motherboards?
If so, what's your experience with them, good/bad?

They both have the same Intel NIC, but do the both also use CSA then?

Thinking about building a computer with one of them. NIC speed important.

Thanks.

 

[Bozo]

I have two PCs with the P4C800-E Deluxe and they are both great.
Don't know about the CSA though.

Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[The JoJo]

What processors are you running on them?

 

[blakerwry]

Both of those motherboards use CSA. CSA is an interesting option if you want Gbit plus have other things on the PCI bus(for example a RAID array).

Even if your hard drives are not on the PCI bus, intel uses the inferior Intel hub architecture which tops out at 266MB/sec for all southbridge operations including PCI, S-ATA, ATA, USB, etc transfers. So heavily utilizing your PCI bus with a Gbit NIC could still cut into the bandwidth available to your hard drives and other I/O devices.

CSA insures that the NIC is as seperate as possible and has bandwidth dedicated to itself so not only does it perform well, but it won't cut into bandwidth for other devices.

 

[The JoJo]

Allright, thanks.

Is there something similar worth looking at on the AMD 64bit side? That would then have to be with a AMD64, not opteron or FX. One with a very good integrated NIC, preferably from Asus or maybe Epox (MSI...probably not/maybe...).

 

[blakerwry]

not yet.. the nforce3 250gb has integrated NIC into the southbridge and I believe Nvidia now uses a 1GB/sec link between NB aznd SB... but the chipset itself is not nearly as mature as an intel offering.

Sis's next generation SB will integrate PCI-E as well as GBit NIC and will surely be featured in A64 boards. That will be interesting for me.

Serverworks is making a chipset for opteron, not sure on its potential a64 future. I would assume it will include 1 or possibly 2 Gbit NICs on the actual boards made and a high speed bus like PCI-X or PCI-E.

 

[blakerwry]

forgot to mention there is an athlonXP version of the nforce2 Ultra400 that will have Gbit integrated... should be more mature...

 

[The JoJo]

Ok, thanks. Googled through a lot of motherboards, and the new Nforce chipset might be something to have a bit later on. Some weird results still between TCP and UDP tests.

Maybe I'll just put a fileserver on a P4C800-E. Thanks everyone!