Question Network switch speed question

[Tony_186]

Hi. I've been planning on buying a cheap network switch for my pc and PS but I'm worried by the max speeds on switches. If my ethernet gets me about 130Mbps download would a switch with 10/100Mbps(this is what I don't really understand) cap my download at 100Mbps? What about the cables, does cat5e have any influence on this since when I fire up speedtest it briefly spikes to 500Mbps but slowly drops down, does this mean the cable doesn't support that speed? How would it work if I connected 2 devices to a switch would the network speed be halved and with each new device therefore devided more?
Thanks

 

[BFG-9000]

Gigabit switches came out 20 years ago so the price difference from 10/100 switches is now negligible.

Yes, a 10/100 switch will limit speed to under 100Mbps. It will actually limit two devices to 100Mbps combined because the input port is limited to 100Mbps too--unless you get one of those switches with a couple gigabit ports and many 10/100 ones.

Cat5e is rated to 2.5Gbit for 100 meters length or 10Gbit up to 45 meters. It's not going to limit speeds at 10/100

 

[bill001g]

In general a switch will not affect your performance. Now if you were to buy a switch that only has 100mbps then it will limit the speed of connected devices to 100mbps. There really is no reason to buy 10/100 switches any more. The cost difference is maybe $5 on 5 and 8 port models to get a switch with 1gbit.

Cat5e cables are rated to 1gbit. The port not the cable limits the speed. Buying a cable with a bigger number like cat6 or cat7 still runs at only 1gbit. If you would have a 10gbit port then you want to use cat6a but for almost everyone else you only need cat5e unless cat6 happens to cost less. It is only a money difference the cables will perform the same.

Most modern switches can run all ports at 1gbit up and 1gbit down all at the same time. So a switch with 5 port could pass 10gbit of total traffic. There is not a realistic configuration that would use all the ports like this but the switch is so fast it will never be the bottleneck. Now in only kinda divides the traffic. It does not evenly divide it, the 2 machine both try to get as much as they can and its hard to say how much exactly each will get. It really is no different that when you plug 2 machines directly into your router. The lan ports are a small switch and they will fight for the WAN bandwidth you purchase from the ISP.

The short answer is going to be buy a gigabit switch and just hook it up and don't worry about stuff it will not limit you in any way.