Are there differences here that are warranted to stay with a motherboard
that has gigabyte lan? doing an upgrade and looking at a AsRock 939 board
that has agp and pci video but only 10/100 lan.
Thoughts please.
Terry
In a home lan, Gigabit networks are most useful for moving
large files, not internet access or other basic uses which
are fully satisfied by 100Mb. By large I mean either dozens
of MB per file or more, or many many moderate sized, say a
few MB each files. If you have that situation then
definitely use Gigabit as it makes a substantial difference.
Even considering general system PCI bus or HDD bottlenecks,
any semi-modern system can expect at least 3X the throughput
and often signficantly more in such large file transfer
scenarios.
What do you mean that the Asrock board has PCI video? If it
has integrated video, it is most likely an AGP ported
video... just because it has an AGP port too, that doesn't
make it PCI video. That is an advantage for using the
video, but rarely a disadvantage as it means that if you
installed an AGP card, it must necessarily disable the
onboard video. Not "really" such a disadvantage though, as
either way for a 2nd display you'd need a PCI video card,
except rarely even integrated video can support two
displays.
Some integrated Gigabit network adapters are better than
others but if you really want that board and don't need
utmost Gigabit performance (which i suspect else you'd
already know it) then you can always get a PCI Gigibit
adapter later for about $15. These cheap $15 cards are not
as fast, but they do still give you at least the 3X increase
in real-world throughput on large files that I've mentioned
above.
If you found multiple reasons why the Asrock board isn't
sufficient though, you might consider a better board,
especially if you'll be using it long-term. $30 more for a
board used for 3 years for example, is under $1 a month.
