So do I. The limiting factor for most people has nothing to do with your hardware, it's the network speed that governs your work. Having a faster anything does zip for increasing the network bandwidth. The sole exceptions might be a video composer or a processor intensive scientific application.
Eventually, everyone will figure out, the network really is the computer.
^^^^^^^^^^Eventually, everyone will figure out, the network really is the computer.^^^^^^^^^^^
That's largely accurate.
Where I work is a great example of just the opposite. We have excellent bandwidth, a huge internet pipe; I've seen our networking back end. It rocks.
Our workstations stink to high hell. They all need ram upgrades, they all have horribly slow hard drives in them, and some brainiac IT person thinks it's cool to use the cheapest power supplies known to man. They're hotter than a stove and break often.
I submit to you that having the greatest network on earth doesn't mean a hill of beans if you can't even access it, or if your portal to the network, your workstation, is so god-awfully slow that the *network* is waiting for you to catch up.
It's all a balance.
Have you seen Killer NIC? For $279 it can seriously reduce latency and lag. It basically takes almost all of the networking load off of the CPU and handles the network buffers in its own memory, then uses optimized algorithms for common tasks. For example, instead of your OS having to traverse the whole networking stack to see if there's data on a port and then pull it, this thing does it in two quick instructions. That's helpful if you're polling a port all the time. Games have seen between 1 and 38 ms lower ping times, and performance gains up to 10% (slightly due to processor offload, but mainly due to not waiting so long checking and pulling data from a port).
It's mainly for gamers since latency is the killer for them, not raw bandwidth. But something like this should speed up a high-traffic business network -- VPN and remoting should love it. Is it cheaper to upgrade your whole network because your remoting UI is jerky, or to put these NICs in those systems that do remoting?