Am I just talking out my a55 or is the powerpc g4 a superb router chip?

Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
so i said, screw my dlink wifi card in my pc, installed winxp 64bit, and then ran internet sharing via firewire400 with the [iBook g4 933mhz with airport extreme] as the dhcp server etc...



the internet connection now is really fast, almost as fast if not exactly just as fast if i had plugged an ethernet cable from my pc directly into my broadband dsl modem...



am i just imagining thing or is mac os x and powerpc g4 and all that altivec stuff just really good for routing all this internet traffic. i mean the dsl signal up and down is going through the airport extreme, and through the fw400. and it is way way better than the dlink 802.11g pci wifi card i had in my pc, operating in native winxp32bit mode and also ndiswrapped in suse9.3 linux.



overall "accessing the internet and web pages" is more responsive on the PC desktop, i guess because it is an amd64 2.38ghz with 1gb ram compared to the powerpc g4 933mhz ibook with 640mb ram.



ooh.. i hope they release those darn rumored mini updates soon, cause that would be sweet, to have the mini on my desktop, a kvm, the mini would be wirelessly accessing the dsl through airport extreme, and the mini would feed, via fw400, internet into my winxp64 pc...



hmmm... okay just the usual rambling for me, take care y'all.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 10
    this is weird, i've only ever seen my dsl do 100kb/sec max but with the setup i described above it seems as though it's "fooled" the dsl thingy do give me 120-140kb/sec not that i am complaining, just a little weirded out, that's all
  • Reply 2 of 10
    Don't know about routers, but different EVDO cards offer different speeds on Macs and Windows.



    Possibly something of the same exists in the router world.
  • Reply 3 of 10
    It's very possible that the Wifi driver for the DLINK blows ass. We also know -- for a fact -- that Windows has a terrible interrupt latency, but ethernet these days often burrows-in below the OS. WiFi does not.



    I'd say that your problem lies in this fact. To understand it, line up 7 to 10 program shortcuts on your windows desktop, and try to rifle through them, double clicking on each one to start it. (do this on a freshly rebooted system, and don't shy away from beefy apps like Photoshop). Do the same thing on the mac by opening up all the apps in your dock.



    I bet your iBook will beat your Athlon. Consider that your WiFi card is more or less doing the same thing, but the data is much smaller.
  • Reply 4 of 10
    yeah i think the dlink driver definitely sucks big time. i've got a lot of respect now for the nvidia nForce amd chipset and its implementation by asus... bypassing the dlink wifi pci either through fw-tcpip or ethernet (i think it has on board gigabit ethernet) will definitely be a breath of fresh air. i'm getting my neighbour to hopefully bring back a nice long cat5 cable for me this evening...



    edit: there are some asus boards with the 802.11g available on the motherboard itself. not sure if that is an asus add-on or how well its integrated with the nForce chipset... not available with my current asus mobo though...
  • Reply 5 of 10
    I'll vote for talking out the rectum.
  • Reply 6 of 10
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Not Unlike Myself

    I'll vote for talking out the rectum.



    to which i say "okay, whatever!!"

    nah, basically i've just discovered what a piece of garbage all these pci wifi cards for windows are. well, specifically the dlink-g520+ though not necessarily meaning that the linksys or netgears are better...
  • Reply 7 of 10
    Quote:

    Originally posted by sunilraman

    yeah i think the dlink driver definitely sucks big time. i've got a lot of respect now for the nvidia nForce amd chipset and its implementation by asus... bypassing the dlink wifi pci either through fw-tcpip or ethernet (i think it has on board gigabit ethernet) will definitely be a breath of fresh air. i'm getting my neighbour to hopefully bring back a nice long cat5 cable for me this evening...



    edit: there are some asus boards with the 802.11g available on the motherboard itself. not sure if that is an asus add-on or how well its integrated with the nForce chipset... not available with my current asus mobo though...




    It doesn't really matter if it's on the board or on a PCI. What matters is BIOS support. If Windows handles the driver, it's going to be slow. There are so many reasons for this, and I won't get into them all.



    As for "talking out my rectum," (I assume that was directed at me) you are free to dig up whatever information you can about interface latencies and methodologies for writing device drivers. I have written device drivers, and do actually know what I'm talking about.
  • Reply 8 of 10
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Splinemodel

    It doesn't really matter if it's on the board or on a PCI. What matters is BIOS support. If Windows handles the driver, it's going to be slow. There are so many reasons for this, and I won't get into them all.



    As for "talking out my rectum," (I assume that was directed at me) you are free to dig up whatever information you can about interface latencies and methodologies for writing device drivers. I have written device drivers, and do actually know what I'm talking about.






    just to clarify it wasn't me that said you were talking out your ass... was another poster above and he/she/it may have been talking about me...



    yeah. i've got a cat 5 going into the wired/wireless router now. things are blisteringly fast compared to the crappy dlink pci card. using the onboard nvidia nforce gigabit (i think) lan. of course, it's only at 100mbps mode when hooked up to the wired/wireless router.



    overall, again, i think its good that nvidia and asus and the like are doing a lot of good hardware stuff that bypass a lot of windoze/device driver trash



    the dlink wifi card has now been relegated to a pentium2-375mhz (o'ced) running suse linux 9.3 and azureus. with power concerns and the like, i thought i'd designate the old skool pII with no cd rom drive and much less of a power draw to do all the azureus client dirty work...



    gotta figure out how to pretty up the damn cat5 cable strung across the hallway though hmm christmas lights? it is only a few months away







    edit:

    http://www.heise.de/ct/english/98/03/122/

    "The difference is enormous: While the old Pentium II of the 'Klamath type' uses 32 Watts at a clock frequency of 300 MHz, the power consumption of 'Deschutes' stays at just 14 Watts at 300 MHz, and a little more than 15 Watts at 333 MHz"



    cool, so i overclocked it to 375mhz so its pulling maybe 20Watts max. plus powersupply and harddisk, mobo, etc, i think it's okay. given that the deschutes is one of the first chips out on intels 250nm tech, that explains its overclockability
  • Reply 9 of 10
    You may want to look into getting a cheap WiFi->ethernet bridge. That would eliminate the long cable. It's also possible that a different PCI card has a better-written driver. You may want to look into that as well.
  • Reply 10 of 10
    cool. will consider it. however right now i'm pretty happy about how we've rigged the cable layout at home, and i have a lot of faith in asus and nvidia nforce. it's even got a yellow and orange light as ethernet status indicators, instead of the usual boring green stuff.



    also this means there should be nothing holding back suse 9.3 64bit.



    i haven't been able to find good wifi-ethernet bridges in my city. they are really nowhere to be found...
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