How do I check the speed of my network card?

mrjaffa

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Currently I have my house wired up with Cat5e and will be soon buying a NAS that will be gigabit enabled. I have a gigabit switch.

To enable gigabit speeds transferring from the PC to my NAS, the PC network card needs to be gigabit, right?

I built the PC myself, with very little knowledge of how to do so (received help online), so even if opened it back up, I probably couldn't point straight away to the network card, let alone know if it's gigabit or not.

I found a link explaining how to check. I ran ncpa.cpl, then clicked on properties of my connection, then configure, then adavnced, and clicked on an entry named speed & duplex. All I could see in the value box was 10 and 100 Mbps.

Does this mean it is not a gigabit network card and will need replacing?
 
Double click on the network icon in the system tray and it should tell you what speed you've connected to your switch at - assuming you PC is connected to your gigabit switch obviously.

Or, find the network card in device manager (assuming Windows) and there might be a clue in its name. If not, let us know the name of the chipset, or use google.

Usually, if you look in the settings for a card, gigabit is only done via auto-negotiate, rather than hard codng as 10/100 FD/HD.
 
Or find the network adapter in the "device manager" and see what it's name is. Thence you can surf for it's spec sheet.

Or from ncpa.cpl, right click the network adapter, open it's "properties" and you can find the NIC name in there (XP - IIRC Vista/WIn7 are similar.)
 
Or find the network adapter in the "device manager" and see what it's name is. Thence you can surf for it's spec sheet.

Ahem,

KrisLee said:
Or, find the network card in device manager (assuming Windows) and there might be a clue in its name. If not, let us know the name of the chipset, or use google.

;)
 
You guys are good!

KrisLee, when I was checking the speed the way I explained, and I could only see 10 and 100mbps mentioned, I thought I was going to have to buy a new card. Auto negotiate was mentioned though.

I've just opened my network centre as double clicking the network icon didn't seem to tell me the speed, clicked on LAN and speed = 1.0gbps.

I think this is the name of my card, right?

Atheros AR8121/AR8113/AR8114 PCI-E Ethernet Controller(NDIS6.20)

But when I google it, it only talks about drivers, so not sure.

So I'm thinking now it is gigabit....

Cheers chaps.
 
I have a 1 GB card, but the best speed I can get is 70 MPS. My iPhone and laptop on the same network get over 200 MPS. Any ideas how to speed up the desktop?
 
Your iphone and laptop are presumably using wifi - the iPhone doesn't have a wired network port, and gigabit ethernet's max throughput is 125Megabyte/second.

The "speed" you can transfer files over a network depends on many elements, not least

1. The speed at which one device can read the data from disk and send to the network
2. The speed at which the other device can write the data to disk.

Thus, copying two files between two computers can result in throughput that is very similar or wildly different: for example, File A is stored as one unbroken stream of data on the disk, whilst file B is fragmented; File A transfers at 100mb/sec, file B at 45mb/sec due to the drive having to seek all over the disk to read it.
 

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