Question about NIC cards (PCI) and 10/100/1000 gigabit

Adventure Man

Adventure Man

New Member
Hi guys, just want to know if I should upgrade my NIC card. It's a zonet nic card with a speed of 10/100. It's been pretty good to me, but I upgraded my internet and now have a 5 MB cable internet (5000kbps download, 500kbps upload). I was wondering if I should upgrade to a 10/100/1000 gigabit Nic. If this will improve my performance/speed. I don't know too much about this, i'm sorry if it's a noob question. I remember though when I bought a telephone 56k modem, way back, that the hardware modems were superior to the software based modems. I don't think this applies here, just wondering what to look for in a new NIC card and if an upgrade is necessary. Thanks a bunch. :)

I've been looking here for cards:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...bit++nic&Submit=ENE&N=0&Ntk=all&Go.x=0&Go.y=0
 
Last edited:
The_Other_One said:
A 10Mb/s is more than enough for basically any internet service. The WAN port on many modems and routers isn't even 100Mb/s
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Oh man, thanks so much. Just a general noob question, what is with the 10/100 spec anyway? I mean I download at about 500 kbytes per sec., upload at about 50. Speakeasy says I have 5000 kbps dl, and 500 ul. I'm just generally confused, any easy way to explain this stuff, to a novice lol?
 
The most common IEEE 802.3 standard used today is the 802.3u standard which specifies link operation speeds of 100Mbps. The standard includes 100Base-TX (twisted pair), 100Base-T4 (not really popular), 100Base-FX (fiber). The standard is also backwards compatible with the 802.3i standard which operated at 10Mbps over twisted pair. These are LAN specs meaning they are used within Local Area Networks.

WAN speed tests are going to report your Internet connections speed being your 5Mbps downstream and 500(?) upstream link. So in other words, the speed test doesn't report back the speed of your LAN.
 
10/100 is the speed of your networking card. Either 10Mb/s or 100Mb/s. Realize you say 5000kb/s. If you do manage those download speeds, that's still only 4.8Mbps. Besides, there are many other factors besides just raw downloads. If you're signal quality is low(bad wires, far from the central ISP, etc etc) you'll get lower rates. If many people share the same connection(problem with Cable, not so much DSL) you get slower perforamce. If the website is slow... I'm sure you get the idea :P
 
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