PCI Throughput Limit

[mstang1988]

What limits will I see with my untangle box knowing it's built on a G41 motherboard running an intel dual core (2.93 Ghz) and using an intel PCI-X Dual NIC hooked to a PCI slot. My real concern is am I going to run out with bandwidth at some point in the PCI bus with a dual Gb Intel NIC?

[dwasserman]

Talking us first about your broadband connection, you have 1 Gb/s ? 100 Mb/s? 20 Mb/s? 5 Mb/s?
I think today this is your real bottleneck.

[sky-knight]

The PCI bus is plenty fast enough for all internet connections. Unless you have some mega high speed fiber line, and if you're doing that with Untangle you can afford better hardware.

[mstang1988]

Mosty it was a theoretical connection. Yes, I do have fiber but it's only 15ish. I'm just looking towards the future and curious as to how long my box will last.

[hescominsoon]

PCI is (which youa re using) not pci-x has a total bandwidth of 1016 megabits/sec. Keep in mind all PCI busses share this total bandwidth. in desktops your usb controllers(1.1 and below and some 2.0) as wlel as any other i/o ports typically occupy this area to. All of this is shared amongst all devices. since you don't have a gigabit connection this isn't an issue. In higher speed area where you actually use gigabit you really want a pci-e nic. pci-x has a higher bandwidth but all pci-x buses also share their bandwidth. pci-e is a point to point so each pci-e bus has it's own bandwidth as denoted by it's factor..1x 2x etc etc. you can see the bandwidth numbers for pci-e here.