GIGBIT LAN bottlenecks?

[jtsnow]

Will I experience significantly faster exchange on my home LAN then with
100baseT thats there now?
Is there a bottle neck limitation in the PC that limits the max amount of
effective throughput to the point where it wont make much difference to hang
a GIGABIT LAN around it?
I have 4 PCs on a home LAN I was considering doing this for to improve HD
backup times I do to a server and to help with other shared bandwidth issues
we are starting to see with the kids playing online games, backups and such.

Any thoughts to suggest if this its worth the trouble to swap out NICs and
router to the GIGBIT world?.

Thank for any insights

[Yousuf Khan]

jtsnow wrote: Will I experience significantly faster exchange on my home LAN then with 100baseT thats there now? Is there a bottle neck limitation in the PC that limits the max amount of effective throughput to the point where it wont make much difference to hang a GIGABIT LAN around it? I have 4 PCs on a home LAN I was considering doing this for to improve HD backup times I do to a server and to help with other shared bandwidth issues we are starting to see with the kids playing online games, backups and such. Any thoughts to suggest if this its worth the trouble to swap out NICs and router to the GIGBIT world?. Thank for any insights

It's been suggested that even a highly tricked out network server
computer with multiple processors cannot sustain speeds on a Gigabit
Ethernet. The packet data requires too much processing overhead. Many
server makers are now experimenting with TOE (TCP/IP Offload Engine)
support in their operating systems. This is a dedicated processor built
into an Ethernet device to handle the packet processing, freeing up the
system processors. I'd say you'd be lucky to get 10% efficiency out of
your Gigabit ethernet on home systems, which will pretty much get you to
100Mbps.

Yousuf Khan