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>>If a wired connection is your only choice for internet
...or you need to move a lot of data through your network. Gigabit isn't going to help much for most people's Internet access.

A standard 33 MHz PCI card/slot does NOT have the bandwidth to support gigabit connections.

If all you're doing is online stuff, this is a waste of time and money.

And if you're transferring files between machines, this is a waste of time and money.

Only a PCIe slot can support gig speeds.

This incidentally, is also the problem with the vast majority of "onboard" LAN chips - they are tied to the PCI buss instead of the PCIe buss, and will do no better than this POS for file transfer.

Also, the math is wrong.

$13-$8+$3 does NOT equal $11.

C'mon, Ben, did your parents waste all that money sending you to Berkley?

Go Bears!

#3 in Ben's world it does :]

Over PCI you should get better speeds than 100, but yes, you won't be able to utilize the full gigabit bandwidth.

dd, Thank you for your enlightening info. I've been wasting time and money for years moving DVD data over gigabit on 33 MHz PCI. Typical throughput is 50MB/s with a DVD transfer about 2 minutes.
PCI 32-bit/33 MHz is 1,067 Mbit/s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bandwidths). That's pretty close to gigabit, no?

Yeah, some people don't seem to appreciate that even over 32bit 33MHz PCI, quadroopling your throughput for $11 is a great deal. Since when could you get a 400% increase in any other area of computing for 11 bucks unless contrasting a floppy drive to a thumbdrive?

#2, #5

Gigabit speeds is theoretically possible under standard 32-bit PCI bus.

32 bits (4 bytes) * 33,000,000 Hz = 10560 bits -> 132 MB/second.

Its still more like 5-10 times the throughput on 100 mbps.

Ignore the guy babbling about skipping this because you won't get true gigabit speeds--whatever bottleneck you have on your home network will be in your router, one of your switches, or your cables--it's not going to be the PCI bus of your computer. I run a file server in my house and transfers with gigabit PCI are cards are dramatically faster than 100 bit ethernet.

The cost shown is totally wrong. I just purchased two (2) cards and the coupon code reduced the cost $8 each. The total cost for two cards was $25.98 + $5.80 shipping = $31.78. Entering in the promo code reduced the price by $16.00 ($8x2=$16) which reduced the cost to $15.78.

This is $7.89 each with shipping included. I will pay this just to hope to get faster transfer speeds between systems.

Ben's math 13 - 8 + 3 = 11?

He needs to buy a calculator.

I have three of these and almost chucked them because they were so flakey. It turns out the Dlink drivers were the culprit. The 530T uses a Marvel Yukon chipset and you have to get the drivers from them. Once I installed the Marvel drivers these cards all worked pretty well. I get 35MB/S pretty regularly through old cables and a somewhat out-of-date gigabit router so that's not bad.

Just checked and my mobo has an open slot... in for one.