Could a BM6/BE6 handle Gigabit ethernet?

Hi Folks,

I'm thinking of upgrading our home office to gigabit LAN. A couple of
the new machines (IS7g and Asus A7V600) have it built on the
motherboards, but we've also got some old but very reliable BE6 and BM6
machines that we still use. The BM6 with an 800MHz Celeron (via adapter)
in particular has become the general purpose file server (have a promise
UDMA100 RAID controller in there).

My question is, if I stick a PCI gigabit card in the old machines, are
there going to be any bottlenecks anywhere that would make the data
throughput substantially slower via these compared with going via one of
the newer ones.

TIA

Gareth.

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I would think that the BE6 would handle it okay a long as there wasn't heavy
competition for the PCI bus bandwidth. keep in mind that if you do not have
an add-in EIDE controller with better capability like you do with the BM6,
the onboard IDE channels are ATA33 at best, which would limit the
performance of the filing system and that could easily become an overall
limitation of the performance of the platform.

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Hmmm..... I seem to recall that the BE6 was one of the first boards to
have UDMA support and the highpoint (366??) controller was limited. Is
it only '33' though?? Somehow I thought it was UDMA66

I'm probably wrong! Been a long time since I built it.

Its the BM6 with the UDMA100 PCI card that would probably be the most
important one. It would be the 'server'
Both the BE6 and BM6 are BX based boards yes?
Therefore would I be correct in assuming that if you think the BE can
handle it (with a fast disk subsystem) then the BM should be ok as well
??
The BM was sold as a lower cost option. I'm hoping it hasn't been
'crippled' in some bus infrastructure way!

TIA

Gareth.



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you are correct that the BE6 has the Highpoint 366 controller which is
ATA66. many people had poor to mediocre performance out the beast but I
never had any issues with it and still have two or more boards in operation
with the Highpoint 366 as the primary controller.

assuming that you have an installation that provides no performance problems
out of the Highpoint controller, you would have at least ATA66 operation.
however, any modern drive is ATA100 and, in theory, you would get even
better performance with an ATA100 drive and controller combination.

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Thomas Geery
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Yeah, your BM6 system will be fine. It's Sunday and Tom's never firing all
cylinders at the weekend. Probably explains why he missed your comment about
this system having an ATA100 PCI card! ;-)

The only downside with it, as Tom correctly says, will be PCI bus contention
issues. The IC7-G and IS7-G boards have a big advantage in this area as the
gigabit ethernet chip is directly linked into the northbridge chip, and thus
doesn't take up PCI bus bandwidth.

However, provided both your UDMA100 card and whatever giganet card you buy
are bus mastering, you should still get a useful network performance boost
from the upgrade, if of course your network is heavily utilised at the
moment.
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yeah, I saw that the BM6 had the ATA100 controller added in but I figured
the comments directed towards the BE6 would still be worthwhile.

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Thomas Geery
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^^^^^^^