Are network cards and network speeds processor limited?

C

Christopher1

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Sep 9, 2005
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I was wondering if anyone else had noticed that with the same hardware on two different machines excepting the processor, that the two machines can get dramatically different network speeds.
The same thing apparently applies on systems running different hardware.

I've noticed that myself, where my old Celeron Processor 2.2 GHZ computer barely gets 78kbps speeds over Wireless-G, but my fathers new Core 2 Duo Vista Machine gets 2Mbps speeds over the same network. The same thing applies to my parents older Pentium 4 machine, it only gets 400kpbs speeds, and it's directly connected to the router.

The only difference that I can see is the processor, because they are all using the same Wireless Router, same network chip, in fact everything connected to networking is the same.

I tried a little test, disabling one of the processors on my father's Core 2 Duo system temporarily, and it bore out...... the speeds on the Wireless networking dropped from 2 Mbps down to only 600kbps.

If networking is so processor limited, does it make sense to get a new network card and put it in my old machine when it apparently isn't going to get the total benefit?
 
Something is seriously wrong with your setup if you are getting those speeds.
 
Maybe processor speed does not directly equate to faster network speeds, but it does indirectly. The difference in speed could be traced to a number of reasons such as, FSB speed, network card using the pci bus as opposed to the pci express bus, hard drive speed, general caching efficiency differences on the north and south bridges.

I know from experience, that a P3 600Mhz is not fast enough to saturate a 100Mbps link with a realtek chipset network card. The 3com's seem to do a little better, but the difference was maybe another 10Mbps at most.

Rix
 
Rix2357 said:
Maybe processor speed does not directly equate to faster network speeds, but it does indirectly. The difference in speed could be traced to a number of reasons such as, FSB speed, network card using the pci bus as opposed to the pci express bus, hard drive speed, general caching efficiency differences on the north and south bridges.

I know from experience, that a P3 600Mhz is not fast enough to saturate a 100Mbps link with a realtek chipset network card. The 3com's seem to do a little better, but the difference was maybe another 10Mbps at most.

Rix
Click to expand...

He's talking about internet speed here. Which is 1-8Mbps at most.
 
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