NIC for Shoutcast broadcasting

[Superunknown98]

Hi everybody, I know this same question is asked alot so sorry.

My friend and i are setting our colleges radio station up using shoutcast. The campus has around 2000 students on it that could acess it at any given time. My question is what NIC should we use in the Pc that broadcasts the signal. I know 3COM and intel are popular answers, but are there any specfic models that would be best? All i'm looking for is something that will have low CPU utilitization and or larger caches.

Oh BTw here are the machine specs if ya have any comments:
Athlon XP 2800+
Nforce 2 ultra motherboard
1Gb DDR333 in dualchanel mode
200GbSE westerndigital drive
Ati raedon 7000 64mb with 2 vga outputs
Maya 44 MK-ll soundcard

 

[Blitzrommel]

If your campus is on a 10/100 network, a consideration is a dual-port 10/100 Intel PRO/100 Server card -- those babies work great with load-balancing enabled.

 

[Superunknown98]

Well heres the deal. The network in the building with the computer is running on 10/100, reaches a fiber backbone, the nbrances to each dorm building back to 10/100 then to wireless acess points or 802.11B.

 

[Nate7311]

Does it really matter? As long as it sends info out, who cares. It's not like it's going to be POUNDED like a server w/ 400 cilents...

I'm involved in running a major Internet Radio Commedy station off a server @ servermatrix.com. GENERIC mobo w/ onboard LAN. Been running SOLID @ 3-6MB/s for about 6 months now on our new server.

As long as it's a NIC, It'll work.


[Shameless Plug] Visit www.nhbradio.com [/Shameless Plug]

 

[mwarps]

You could probably get away with a toekn ring card unless you actually get listeners. Even once you get listeners, it's unlikely to hurt your onboard lan.

If you actually want to do it right, get multiple nics to ensure you can provide for all your listeners.

Regardless, CPU usage on these cards is so low it doesn't matter.

Shoutcast might make the system crawl though. I haven't used it in a while, but it made my old machine crawl.

 

[Superunknown98]

THanks for the info guys, I thought it would put quite a load on the NIC but i guess not.

 

[alrox]

Originally posted by mwarps
You could probably get away with a toekn ring card unless you actually get listeners. Even once you get listeners, it's unlikely to hurt your onboard lan.

If you actually want to do it right, get multiple nics to ensure you can provide for all your listeners.

Token ring and ethernet are 2 different incompatible technologies. He needs a regular fast ethernet card.

Using more than 1 NIC requires a special configuration on the switchports he's attatched too, which the school network admins won't/can't provide. Plus, he doesn't need it. Even with an old realtek fast ethernet NIC he'll be able to push a lot more bandwidth than the school can give him.

Faster CPU and more RAM is what he should be concerned with in a shoutcast server, not a NIC.

 

[Nate7311]

Originally posted by alrox
Token ring and ethernet are 2 different incompatible technologies. He needs a regular fast ethernet card.

Using more than 1 NIC requires a special configuration on the switchports he's attatched too, which the school network admins won't/can't provide. Plus, he doesn't need it. Even with an old realtek fast ethernet NIC he'll be able to push a lot more bandwidth than the school can give him.

Faster CPU and more RAM is what he should be concerned with in a shoutcast server, not a NIC.

Ditto

 

[mwarps]

Originally posted by alrox
Token ring and ethernet are 2 different incompatible technologies. He needs a regular fast ethernet card.

Using more than 1 NIC requires a special configuration on the switchports he's attatched too, which the school network admins won't/can't provide. Plus, he doesn't need it. Even with an old realtek fast ethernet NIC he'll be able to push a lot more bandwidth than the school can give him.

Faster CPU and more RAM is what he should be concerned with in a shoutcast server, not a NIC.

Satire is lost on you people