Gigabit Router

[timc]

I bought a 5 port Netgear for about £35 in PC World which works well and there's an 8 port version as well. Both unmanaged.

[Shonk]

They all use the same chipsets these days

Either Realtek or Broadcom etc.

[ame=http://www.amazon.co.uk/8-Port-Unmanaged-Gigabit-Desktop-Switch/dp/B000N9B688/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1309635266&sr=8-2]8-Port Unmanaged Gigabit Desktop Switch: Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories[/ame]

this isnt a bad switch

Its a Broadcom chipset (i checked mine)
I picked it up the other week to replace a Netgear GS608
from 2004 that uses about 30watts

Power use is around 4 watts and its almost stone cold to the touch
and have pulled 900mbit swiching speed over smb with it

Its only downside is it doesnt have a light indicating a gigabit link
but thats no problem for me as i can check at the 24port gigabit switch its uplinked to

I can live with 1 or 2 ms.

What seems to be going to give me a latency hit is the Sagem router itself has only got fast ethernet which seems to indicate from Shonk's post that my ping times won't be so good.

I barely ever game online these days so I'm not too worried.

I just want to make sure my complicated network still works fast when I move into the flat. There's a server in .nl which is fuse mounted on a Debian server which rsyncs the data across daily and serves out both the local and the remote data to the network with Samba and Mediatomb, which will consist of the main PC, smartphone, smartTV, bluray and WD TV Live.

2ms lag isn't going to kill me!

I'm thinking the simplest way is to stick with the Sagem router unless I find there's several megabits in it, and just grab gigabit switches.

Is it worth spending money on the switches, or should I just get cheap ones?

[Scubbie]

8-Port Unmanaged Gigabit Desktop Switch: Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories

this isnt a bad switch

lol - I'd have to agree. It works just fine.

Its a Broadcom chipset (i checked mine)
I picked it up the other week to replace a Netgear GS608
from 2004 that uses about 30watts

Power use is around 4 watts and its almost stone cold to the touch
and have pulled 900mbit swiching speed over smb with it

I'd agree with this. The specs for the routers do indicate that they use very little power if you have a short Ethernet cable. It rises a little with longer cables, but generally most people are not going to have all 8 ports connected to 100m Cat 6 cable in the domestic environment.

Its only downside is it doesnt have a light indicating a gigabit link but thats no problem for me as i can check at the 24port gigabit switch its uplinked to

This is a small problem. I have been advised that some switches used in the large business environment have a habit of dropping their speed down to 100Mb by a friend. Once the speeds have dropped, she needs to reset the switch to get it back to 1Gbit.

Again I can check the speed by looking at the router in my case, or the PC. Both will confirm the connection speed, but an LED colour change on the front would make this much clearer.

[Shonk]

I have had gigabit ethernet for around 11 years
The only time i have seen a switch drop down to 10/100
is from a cable fault
And once from port 7 on my 24 port Switch
That went faulty but i rma'd that

TP-Link always seem to do it
i also have two TP-Link WR-1043ND's running dd-wrt
and they are the same no indication for gigabit

Im running most of my uplinks
on standard cat5 not cat5e
since i wired the house up in 1999

And have run saturation tests in the past and have pulled 980mbit over them just fine
i have picked up cat6 cables for new runs
and the quality is nowhere near as good as my old cat5 cables
they are solid copper

[Quartermass]

[ame="http://www.amazon.co.uk/TP-Link-Gigabit-Unmanaged-Desktop-TL-SG1005D/dp/B000N99BBC/ref=sr_1_2?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1309653435&sr=1-2"]These [/ame]are the switches I'm intending using.

I'm running a two cat6 cables from the Sky router, one to the living room and one to the spare room. The spare room is where the server is, so needs no switch. The living room needs a switch as there's 3 devices going there with ethernet. The router will connect to a switch.

[ame="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Netgear-GS105-5-port-Gigabit-Ethernet/dp/B0000E5SEQ/ref=sr_1_15?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1309653611&sr= 1-15"]These[/ame] are significantly more expensive.but over all it's not a huge extra expense. Can't see a real reason to get them though

[Shonk]

The netgears where portable toasters last time i tried them

[Quartermass]

That's a reason to avoid those then... I was thinking perhaps if they were more energy efficient it'd be worth sticking with those.

When you said "TP-Link always seem to do it" did you mean they do the job fine, or did you mean they drop to 10/100 from gigabit?

[timc]

I've got the Netgear GS605 which runs total cool.

Often heard complaints about Netgear equipment running hot but none of mine does.