Performance Measurements on Gigabit Ethernet NICs and Server Quality Motherboards

The behaviour of various Gigabit Ethernet NIC’s and server quality motherboards has been investigated. The latency, throughput, and the activity on the PCI buses and gigabit Ethernet links were chosen as perfo rmance indicators. The tests were performed using two PCs connected back-to-back and sending UDP/IP frames from one to the other. This paper shows the importance of the NIC-PCI memory bus chipset combination, CPU power, good driver / operating system design and configuration to achieve and sustain Gigabit transfer rates. With these considerations taken into account, and suitably designed hardware, transfers can operate at G igabit speeds. Some recommendations are given for potential high performance data servers.