help setting up a direct gbit connection between 2 comps

O

oblivionx

Weaksauce
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Feb 9, 2004
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Hi guys,

I just wanted to get some clarification on how / if I can do this. I currently have two computers, both running windows xp. One of the computers is my personal fileserver that I just built, with a ton of HDs. It has an onboard gbit ethernet port. It's using this board:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813131014
( ASUS M2NPV-VM Socket AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 6150 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard )

The other computer has a gbit pci NIC card and an onboard gbit ethernet port. The mobo is a Asus P4P800-E Deluxe. The pci nic is connected to my router, for internet access. Right now the fileserver is also connected to the router, but my router is only 100mbit, so I want to directly connect my two computers using a crossover cable.

How do I go about doing this? From what I understand, all I need to do is connect them with a crossover cable, and then assign an ip address to each computer. However, when I tried this, I still didn't seem to be getting gbit speeds. I didn't have a chance to benchmark it, but windows xp was reporting connected at 100mbit on both computers. Is there an advanced option to enable gbit? Or is it possible that windows is reporting an incorrect speed? Do the computers need to be off when I plug the cable in?

Any suggestions on how to test this out / properly set it up are welcome. When I get home from work I'll try it again.

Thanks in advance,
Kevin
 
Hi. I'm a bit new to learning about networking,but I think I may know the problem.What type of crossover cable are you using? It needs to be a cat 5e ethernet crossover cable to achive gbit speeds. A normal cat 5 will limit it to 100 Mbps.
 
yeah you need a "crossover" cat 5E or better cable.

you would then need to set manually the IP on each nic card (sinc their is no dhcp server to assign)
 
oblivionx said:
Hi guys,

I just wanted to get some clarification on how / if I can do this. I currently have two computers, both running windows xp. One of the computers is my personal fileserver that I just built, with a ton of HDs. It has an onboard gbit ethernet port. It's using this board:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813131014
( ASUS M2NPV-VM Socket AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 6150 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard )

The other computer has a gbit pci NIC card and an onboard gbit ethernet port. The mobo is a Asus P4P800-E Deluxe. The pci nic is connected to my router, for internet access. Right now the fileserver is also connected to the router, but my router is only 100mbit, so I want to directly connect my two computers using a crossover cable.

How do I go about doing this? From what I understand, all I need to do is connect them with a crossover cable, and then assign an ip address to each computer. However, when I tried this, I still didn't seem to be getting gbit speeds. I didn't have a chance to benchmark it, but windows xp was reporting connected at 100mbit on both computers. Is there an advanced option to enable gbit? Or is it possible that windows is reporting an incorrect speed? Do the computers need to be off when I plug the cable in?

Any suggestions on how to test this out / properly set it up are welcome. When I get home from work I'll try it again.

Thanks in advance,
Kevin
Click to expand...

The cards will autodetect speed/duplex unless you specifically override them in the properties (advanced) for the NIC.

To see what speed the card is actually running just right-click on the connection in your network neighborhood and select status.

You should be able to run gigabit over CAT5 if the cable is not too long. You may not get quite the throughput of Cat5e or Cat6 due to retries and what-not, however.

Full gigabit ethernet will deliver more data than most common disk subsystems (Including drive, controller, bus) can handle. I seldom see over 250Kbps on mine, with Cat6 and good GB switches. If you are using windows to copy stuff that sux anyway for speed measurement. Find a testing tool, check some other threads and read the stickys at the top of this group.

BTW you may not need a crossover cable anyway, a lot of cards will autodetect the proper config. Try a 'straight' cable between the comps and see what happens.

Or heck pick up a 5 port gig switch, you can get them for 25 bucks: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16833127083.


thePP
 
Most crossover cables I have seen are for 100 MB systems. Pins 1-2 and 3-6 are swapped but 4-5 and 7-8 are NOT. This is NOT going to give you a complete crossover cable for gigabit. Reference here (end of page) and Here.

I would never make a Gigabit crossover cable in my environment, because we have a lot of POE (Power over ethernet), and switching your positive and negative on an end device can only lead to no good. Pins 4-5 are negative and 7-8 are positive meaning a gigabit crossover would cause the POE polarity to be switched.

There is a feature that most gigabit network equipment supports. It is cabbed auto mdi / mdix. This is a feature that takes the guesswork out of weather you need a crossover cable or not. It will automaticaly detect if the port needs to be crossed over and set itself. I see no documentation on the net that indicates that ALL Gigabit network cards are auto mdi-x capable, but a simple Google search of the network chipset your Asus board uses and it looks like the card does support auto-MDIX.

Just use a standard cable, if that doesent work then you may have to go look for a GIGABIT Crossover.
 
moetop said:
Most crossover cables I have seen are for 100 MB systems. Pins 1-2 and 3-6 are swapped but 4-5 and 7-8 are NOT. This is NOT going to give you a complete crossover cable for gigabit. Reference here (end of page) and Here.

I would never make a Gigabit crossover cable in my environment, because we have a lot of POE (Power over ethernet), and switching your positive and negative on an end device can only lead to no good. Pins 4-5 are negative and 7-8 are positive meaning a gigabit crossover would cause the POE polarity to be switched.

There is a feature that most gigabit network equipment supports. It is cabbed auto mdi / mdix. This is a feature that takes the guesswork out of weather you need a crossover cable or not. It will automaticaly detect if the port needs to be crossed over and set itself. I see no documentation on the net that indicates that ALL Gigabit network cards are auto mdi-x capable, but a simple Google search of the network chipset your Asus board uses and it looks like the card does support auto-MDIX.

Just use a standard cable, if that doesent work then you may have to go look for a GIGABIT Crossover.
Click to expand...
I agree, i would use standard Cat 53 and get a Gigabit Router. I would look into some Netgear Gigabit router or even a switch if you want to set up static ip's just for data transfers
 
Wow, an amazing amount of wrong information in this thread regarding cabling.

1) Don't use a crossover cable btween two Gigabit devices. The GigE spec has auto-crossover support included. (Nway/Auto-MDIX)

2) The minimum cable spec for Gigabit is 4 pairs of Cat 5. There's no "you have to run a shorter cable" or "it wont run as fast". That being said, good luck finding a plain Cat 5 cable anymore, so just use Cat 5e as a minumum. It supports full spec'd distance to 100 meters. Check pricing on Cat 6 cables, it's pretty good, you may want to get that instead.

To the OP: Purchase an inexpensive Gigabit switch. Connect both of your PC's to it with regular straight through cables. Then connect that Gigabit switch to your router, also with a straight through cable.

You'll be good to go. The switch linked to previously looks pretty good. I have some Netgears that work great too.
 
valve1138 said:
Wow, an amazing amount of wrong information in this thread regarding cabling.

1) Don't use a crossover cable between two Gigabit devices. The GigE spec has auto-crossover support included. (Nway/Auto-MDIX)

.
Click to expand...

I had always thought Auto MDIX was a HP licensed technology. But apparently it was included in the 802.3ab standard.

I also find it odd that people are insistent that you need cat5e or cat6, and or that a shorter cable will work better or it wont work over cat5. One of the main requirements behind 802.3ab was it would work over the existing cat5 infrastructure that was predominantly installed at the time.

This leave me wondering why there are so many people selling gigabit crossovers.
 
valve1138 said:
Wow, an amazing amount of wrong information in this thread regarding cabling.

1) Don't use a crossover cable btween two Gigabit devices. The GigE spec has auto-crossover support included. (Nway/Auto-MDIX)

2) The minimum cable spec for Gigabit is 4 pairs of Cat 5. There's no "you have to run a shorter cable" or "it wont run as fast". That being said, good luck finding a plain Cat 5 cable anymore, so just use Cat 5e as a minumum. It supports full spec'd distance to 100 meters. Check pricing on Cat 6 cables, it's pretty good, you may want to get that instead.

To the OP: Purchase an inexpensive Gigabit switch. Connect both of your PC's to it with regular straight through cables. Then connect that Gigabit switch to your router, also with a straight through cable.

You'll be good to go. The switch linked to previously looks pretty good. I have some Netgears that work great too.
Click to expand...

Sup Valve :cool: Good info, glad someone demucked the thread a bit.

It should also be pointed out (just so the OP isn't surprised) that if you're using desktop boards and NICs, you won't achieve true gigabit speeds. The 32-bit PCI bus doesn't carry the bandwidth for Gb, and as has been pointed out your disks won't come anywhere close to saturating the PCI bus unless you have a serious RAID system on both ends.
 
PopeKevinI said:
Sup Valve :cool: Good info, glad someone demucked the thread a bit.

It should also be pointed out (just so the OP isn't surprised) that if you're using desktop boards and NICs, you won't achieve true gigabit speeds. The 32-bit PCI bus doesn't carry the bandwidth for Gb, and as has been pointed out your disks won't come anywhere close to saturating the PCI bus unless you have a serious RAID system on both ends.
Click to expand...

Yo Pope. :cool:

To add to that. GigE is still a lot faster than 100 meg despite all that. Worth the small cost increase IMO.
 
valve1138 said:
Yo Pope. :cool:

To add to that. GigE is still a lot faster than 100 meg despite all that. Worth the small cost increase IMO.
Click to expand...

I *think* GigE on PCI maxes at something like 750 Mb. It's been a while since I did the math on that, so take it with a grain of salt. And performance can decrease depending on the load of other devices on your PCI.

And of course other things can eat into it; it can be fairly CPU intensive, especially if you've got bad drivers.

edit: One thing is certain; on a typical desktop system, going to GigE takes the bottleneck off your network and puts it on your drive(s) and/or PCI bus.
 
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