Gigabit Switch + Jumbo Frames questions

Dougiebabe2003 · 7 Oct 2008 at 18:14

Hi all,

Looking to wire my house up with CAT5e cable and run it gigabit as wireless is just plain annoying and I don't see the point in only going FAST when Gigabit is only slightly more.

Now my question is this:

What switch should I be looking for? Im not after something really fancy, just an 8 port gigabit switch. Deffinatly don't want to spend more than £100 with £50 being preferred.

Jumbo Frames. Is this anything decent or should I just be ignoring it? It seems to speed up huge transfers but will only work with gigabit enabled PC's?

I have one 100MB PC still in the house and my internet will be coming in through a 100MB ADSL Router... would this mean that if I enabled Jumbo Frames everything either wouldn't work, go slow or just be annoying for ever more?

Sorry about this but it's all quite confusing to me!

Thebug · 7 Oct 2008 at 18:32

The Netgear GS608 supports jumbo frames from version 2 onwards - £41.11 delivered

http://kbserver.netgear.com/kb_web_files/n101624.asp

AtaRo · 7 Oct 2008 at 23:41

use CAT6 instead of CAT5e.

PhillyDee · 8 Oct 2008 at 00:37

AtaRo said:
use CAT6 instead of CAT5e.

Depends on the length and quality of cabling. I get Gigabit speeds easily with Cat5e around my house. No run is longer than 20metres though. Cat6 is apparently awkward about bend radii etc. (Apparently anyway).

AtaRo · 8 Oct 2008 at 00:49

PhillyDee said:
Depends on the length and quality of cabling. I get Gigabit speeds easily with Cat5e around my house. No run is longer than 20metres though. Cat6 is apparently awkward about bend radii etc. (Apparently anyway).

Individual strands of CAT6 are bigger than CAT5e so in general even a cheap CAT6 cable will be better than CAT5e.

Imy · 8 Oct 2008 at 14:51

I was doing a new setup and used Cat6 - thought might as well.

Get the netgear TheBug mentioned. It comes in 5 and 8 port versions and can be positioned standing (with supplied stand) or flat.

Bare in mind, to take advantage of jumbo frames, it needs to be supported at both ends of the connection i.e. your PC's NIC as well as the switch. I haven't bothered with it myself as my bottleneck is crap Windows networking.