Router and Switch

[paulselhi]

I currently have a virgin supplied single portrouter which connects to PC1 which uses ICS to supply all the other machines in my house via an antiquated hub.

What i want to do is twofold

1. I want a router to connect to the internet which allows all my machines indepenant acess to the internet

2. I want to make use of the gigabyte connections between the pcs for file sharing/render farm

For 2 i thought of buying a gigabyte switch but for 1 i don't think this will work as each box will be competeting for the virgin supplied ip adresss

If i buy a 4 port router as well then how would i make use of the gigabyte home network as i don't think the virgin routers on sale here are setup for gigabyte speeds

 

[paulselhi]

So the cable router links via one port to the switch which links to all the pc's. Will they now still get independant ip adresses from the router ?

 

[paulselhi]

Thanks for the info, the main idea is to allow everyone to get internet (3-4 users) and be able to game online ( no ip adress hassles) and for me i want to,,well apart from surf for porn..i want to have all the pc's available for 3d distributed rendering work ( Max and Cinema 4D)

For the later the only really usefull boxes we have are an I7, two dual cores and a single core. ( there are three other machines but not really pwerfull enough and are kept as emergency boxes)

At the moment i run xp 64 pro but when rendering internally i am hampered by one machine having a 10 Mbps NIC the others have gigabyte NIC's and i think my old hub is 10mbps anyway

Thing is when rendering the most i can get is 10 cores at once, and i think i would have to up to windows server to get all cores to play