High dollar network cards

[davmoo]

I am not a gamer, nor do I play one on TV, thus my ignorance on this topic. And as a non-gamer, I regularly buy $9.95 nics when I need one.

Last week I was at Fry's picking up a gigabit nic (on sale for $9.95). I noticed they also had some very high dollar ($200 and up) nics aimed squarely at gamers.

As a non-gamer, I honestly don't see how a super-duper expensive nic is going to help your online gaming enough to warrant spending that kind of money. Is one of these cards going to really have enough of an impact on network latency and such to be worth that price to a gamer? Or is it just a gimmick?

[darknessgp]

short answer: no

Longer answer: Unless their machine already sucks, no. The high dollar nics basically takes away the need for the cpu and ram to manage your network traffic. Think of it like a graphic card, except instead of running something like Crysis, they are playing Pong. Those expensive nics are overkill for any gamer with a halfway decent machine, as network traffic doesn't take up that much resources.

[tokenuser]

Only thing I can thing I can think of is a fiber connected NIC.
Specialist card though, and needs a fibre based hub ...

[computoman]

Not that they should have a high price tag, but some newer pro nics may include support for pxe and gpxe. Most cheap nics do not support pxe or even have a socket needed to hold a chip that has pxe or gpxe code. I will go pick up a used 3com or intel nic for a song if I need that pxeboot feature. That is how i made old pentium 1/2's act as thin clients for use with the linux termial server to remotely load an os. Though you can use a media based etherboot to do the same thing for romless nics. So now I use it quite frequently to turn a desktop into a diskless client. No hard drives to image!!!! Most new motherboards have at least the pxe feature built into them when they have an on board nic. gpxe is an awesome technology where you can load an os remotely even from a web server anywhere on the planet or where you havea net connection for both the server and the client. Be a mswindows box one minute and reboot into a linux box the next minute all without a local hard drive. Norton ghost and vmware hae teamed up to do this with virtual machines, A server for doing this is required though. Makes systems much more compatible for diskless iscsi use. There are other features like being able to install an os for systems with harddrives without having to carry a cd around such as drbl/clonezilla does. Actually you can do that with a simple tftp and dhcp server setup to work together. You can even clone multiple machines at the same time without even physically touching the machine to be imaged such as The Fog project does. Not only can it be done remotely, but automatically or at a preset time such as the graveyard. Also too at least for a time some of the cheap nics acted like the old winmodems and offloaded processing to the cpu. The better nics do a better job of doing all the network handking on the board itself. The better nics are a usually lot more robust also. Some of the pro nics have more than one port thus being more than

one nic in one card. Caveat emptor anyway.

But somehow I think you already knew all that.

[fishtoprecords]

The mega nics are really computers. They have local CPUs and ram, and put several of the lower levels of the TCP/IP stack onboard, offloading the main CPU. And they can cut the number (frequency) of interupts and context switches on the main CPU.

They have more theortical benefit than real, unless your main CPU is old and slow, in which case you need a new CPU and probably new video cards first.

They also have some cute hacks, which lie to other users about your network latency. Some might consider this unfair or unethical.

[trunolimit]

Not that they should have a high price tag, but some newer pro nics may include support for pxe and gpxe. Most cheap nics do not support pxe or even have a socket needed to hold a chip that has pxe or gpxe code. I will go pick up a used 3com or intel nic for a song if I need that pxeboot feature. That is how i made old pentium 1/2's act as thin clients for use with the linux termial server to remotely load an os. Though you can use a media based etherboot to do the same thing for romless nics. So now I use it quite frequently to turn a desktop into a diskless client. No hard drives to image!!!! Most new motherboards have at least the pxe feature built into them when they have an on board nic. gpxe is an awesome technology where you can load an os remotely even from a web server anywhere on the planet or where you havea net connection for both the server and the client. Be a mswindows box one minute and reboot into a linux box the next minute all without a local hard drive. Norton ghost and vmware hae teamed up to do this with virtual machines, A server for doing this is required though. Makes systems much more compatible for diskless iscsi use. There are other features like being able to install an os for systems with harddrives without having to carry a cd around such as drbl/clonezilla does. Actually you can do that with a simple tftp and dhcp server setup to work together. You can even clone multiple machines at the same time without even physically touching the machine to be imaged such as The Fog project does. Not only can it be done remotely, but automatically or at a preset time such as the graveyard. Also too at least for a time some of the cheap nics acted like the old winmodems and offloaded processing to the cpu. The better nics do a better job of doing all the network handking on the board itself. The better nics are a usually lot more robust also. Some of the pro nics have more than one port thus being more than

one nic in one card. Caveat emptor anyway.

But somehow I think you already knew all that.

That sounds really cool. I'm looking for a networking project to do for my senior project and I think I just found it thank you.

one question though. how does this work in practice. obviously you'd have to have a heck of alot of bandwidth to make this practical. do you have any literature to recommend on this topic.

[computoman]

Usually the server has two nics. One for the existing network and one for the thin client network via a switch. The server acts like a router so to speak. Generally cloning multiple machines at the same times uses multicasting so not as much a traffic issue as one would think. Iscsi or fat client os networks might be bit more of a challenge if all machines are booting at the same time. I have no problem booting ten thin clients on our network at the same time. Generally they will be left on all the time anyway during working hours. you can have the server remotely boot systems in a staggerred pattern automatically just before the work day starts. There is more than one way to skin a cat. You can do all this with most any major os such as Unix, Bsd, Microsoft, Apple Osx, Linux, vmware, or etc. Unless you are using Bsd or Linux expect to pay literally thousands of dollars for server and client licensing unless you have a sponsor. I know the equivalent of our thin client network using Microsoft would have been close to three thousand dollars alone just for software. I thnk using Apple was close to that also. That being said you can get Legitimate Microsoft and Apple server shrinkwrap licenses off of Ebay and the like for a song once in a while. We bought win2ks and citrix server for just fifty dollars (twenty five dollars each). Now that linux is becoming more prevalent, you will probably see even more of that for the older versions. Linux has been at no charge so far though without paid support. I am the sole admin, tech, helpdesk, cook, janitor, and chief bottle washer instead to replace the paid support. Paid support is worth it for businesses and highly recommended..

You do need to have a good basic knowlege of hardware and software from servers to clients. Generally where to get the information? I started just using a web search engine with terms such as free thin client os, pxeboot tftp netboot dhcp, aoe iscsi, or free terminal server to begin with and expanded from there. You get the idea....
Linux starters for me were:
www.ltsp.org (ltsp is now being absorbed back into Redhat/Fedora)
www.k12ltsp.org (used quite a bit in schools and small businesses around the world)
www.etherboot.org
www.rom-o-matic.org
Muekow (spelling?)
drbl/clonezilla
Fog project

You may also want to look at xampp (generic) lamp (;inux), wamp (windows), and or mamp (apple mac) web servers.
(amp = apache, mysql, and php or perl). ingx, lighttpd, or a zillion others. I am not a fan of native MS web server.

Most colleges do not have courses in open source about all this. I wish I could get a second sheepskin for all the research that I have done on my own. Taking a class would have saved quite a bit of research though not as much fun, I have taken classes for the M$ equivalent though taking six hours of learning unix using linux and the lpi exam class really wet the appetite. The easy way is to go to your local user groups to a find a mentor.

"Just do it" and "The more you know!" ..............