[SOLVED] Can 10 year old PC handle 50 Mbps internet

[srpandey]

I have a old PC with Core2duo E7200 cpu and 100 mbps NIC. I am planning to use it for net surfing. Can it fully utilize 50 Mbps fiber connection or the CPU will saturate as there is no graphics card ?

 

[Math Geek]

should be ok. i have a 10 yr old pc with a q6600 that is using a GB connection and easily gets 500 mb/s through wifi and the usb 2.0 slot.

50 md/s should be easy for it to handle through ethernet

 

[rgd1101]

depend? what are you doing online?

 

[karenjoly]

The issue is not the cpu but the disk, as in, what is the write speed (transfer rate) of the HDD ? Internet data gets written to disk so disk read write performance is important.

50mbs is 6.5 MB/s. Check the specs on the drive to see that it can handle 6 MB/s.

 

[Math Geek]

for "net surfing" drive speed is not that important really. now for mass downloading and such then it would make a heck of a difference on an old slow drive. my old pc writes at about 20 MB/s if i recall right. at least that's what steam tells me when it is downloading/installing a game.

streaming video would sit in ram as even 1080p is less than 5 mb/s which ram can easily hold.

 

[USAFRet]

for "net surfing" drive speed is not that important really. now for mass downloading and such then it would make a heck of a difference on an old slow drive. my old pc writes at about 20 MB/s if i recall right. at least that's what steam tells me when it is downloading/installing a game.

streaming video would sit in ram as even 1080p is less than 5 mb/s which ram can easily hold.

And a 20 megabytes/sec from Steam equates to a 150 megabit line from the ISP.
Approx 8:1

 

[Math Geek]

sorry for the confusion i was talking about my hard drive itself and how fast steam reports it is writing data to the drive. that was in response to karen's statement about an old slow hdd keeping the connection from running its fullest.

so the 50 mb/s line would only need the drive to write at 6.25 MB/s which is not that much overall even for an old hdd to keep up with.

 

[dontlistentome]

I agree that it depends on what you are hoping to do online.
1. Your connection type just means this amount of data moves from Point A to Point B every second.
2. Okay, now that data is at Point B, now what? If Point B is your computer, then what are you going to do with that data?

For instance, you can have a connection that allows you to stream 4k video, but does your computer have the ability to PLAY 4k videos?