Fiber NIC?

K

Kritter

Gawd
Joined
May 1, 2005
Messages
621
Is there such a thing as a fiber gigabit ethernet card(1000base-sx sc/sc) for pci or even pci-e incarnations?

I know they had 64-bit pci cards but i dont happen to have a server motherboard on hand and don't have an extra grand to blow on a board and card.
 
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Using a Vanilla PCI-based solution for GigE over Fiber is highly discouraged, but a PCI-Express solution is a great idea... price not being a factor, of course.

Please note that a great many of the PCI 66/100MHz cards will also hobble along on a paltry 33MHz slot. Just be sure to check the documentation before plugging in your shiny, new GigE card...
 
Where short distances are a factor there is not that much difference between fiber and copper performance. What distance are you trying to cover? Fiber is used primarily to eliminate the performance problems that occur when running copper over extended lengths. Why not go with copper and save some cash?
 
With some searching, you can pickup an older intel fiber gigabit network card on ebay for pretty cheap. I got a few of them a few years back, because back then the switches we used at the LANparties were all 100mbit with gigabit fiber uplinks.

They were all 64-bit cards, but work just fine in a normal PCI slot (just make sure the extra part of the card that will just hang off the back won't hit a capacitor on your motherboard or something).
 
Hmm exactly what would be the point for 1000Mbit on PCI 33Mhz? -
33x10(6) * 32Bit = 1056Mbit/s = 132MB/s - PCI bus is only 133MB/s - and through that you need to pull all your other data like your IDE channel etc. You saturate far too quickly for it to be of any good, sure burst transfers maybe quick, but you would get nothing sustained, Gigabit is only really any good on new motherboards with PCI express or server boards. If you are using an older mobo one of the quickest ways to ensure best performance is to ensure that your NIC is not on a shared slot with another high throughput device.
 
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