Gigabit Ethernet Cabling

ahoyhoy,
i know ive been annoying you guys lately, but im trying to make a fast home network.

my whole house is cabled with cat5e, and i want to run gigabit ethernet over it.

its all Systimax cable which was made in april 2002, and im wondering if this will work to full speed, or the 350mbps some book i read siad.
any help would be great thanks,
cazzman.

Assuming the whole house is wired to Cat5e standards, it should be suitable for gigabit ethernet.

What are you going to be using such a fast network for? Gigabit is really a backbone technology (which is why most of the gigabit networking kit is so expensive), it's not really meant for normal LAN applications...although I have read in the IT press that gigabit will be coming to desktop soon - I think that's more of a waste than running Word on a 3GHz P4 desktop...

Just my thoughts...
AndyF

A fair few motherboards (and I'm talking desktop boards here) come with GB networking onboard.

So if you've got it, use it

Admittedly the switches are still pricey, but they'll come down in time. Look at 100MB switches. They go for peanuts these days.

It is highly debateable as to if anything you do on a home network would even be able to touch the surface with regards of GB ethernet.
Sure you might be able to transfer files quicker between your machines but that is about it - if you think gaming is going to suddenly be 100x better you'll be in for a disapointment.
With the price of GB Switches still being sky high I'd very much deem it a waste of money for the home user.

yeah, thanks guys.
i just wanted to know so i can upgrade in the future.
i just watned to be sure that when i built my new house and cabled it with cat5e that i hadnt wasted all the money on the cabling that wasnt going to work.
29cat5eoutlets in 18 sqaure house takes more time and money to rewire with newer cable, so i was just hoping that this was good enough stuff..
thanks guys,
cazzman.

one more question, does gigabit transfer a gigaBYTE in a second or what?
thanks,
cazzman.

8 bits = 1 byte, so the answer to your question would be no. You'd be looking at more like 12-16 seconds per GB.

Of course that would be dependant upon hard drives, etc, being able to keep up with that speed, which they cannot (yet).

I'm using Linksys's cheap 5 port gigabit switch and their
$40. cards. I get 28 megabytes per second transfers on cat 5e

I think that if you've got the gigabit hardware in place why not.

I bought an ABIT IS7 motherboard (great bit a kit BTW) which advertised that it had 100 Mbit LAN on board, but did in fact come integrated with an Intel GigaBit LOM nic. It was purchased nearly a year ago and is just a normal desktop board. I think you'll be hard pushed to find new M/Bs these days that don't come with gigabit networking.

Even though fast ethernet (100 Mbit) is pretty quick, I still hate sitting around waiting for the odd divx movie to transfer from my server.

P.S - I've just checked pricing for a 1000 Mbit NIC and you can pick one up from dabs.com for an amazing 13.50 pounds . For that money, you'd be stupid not to go for it.