PCI Lanes and 10GbE NICs

[anchit02]

Hello guys,

I got 3 PCs in my network, the specs for the three PCs are given below. Anyway, I've recently come across 3 used GbE NICs (Intel X550 T2) for free cause my company is scrapping one of their servers, so I and was planning to install them on my 3 PCs and set up a Peer-to-Peer 10GbE connection for transferring files between the 3 PCs. As each cards have 2 ports, I can hook up PC1-PC2, PC2-PC3, and PC3-PC1. And lastly, the NIC uses PCiE v3.0 (8.0 GT/s) x4 connection.

Now, given the specs of each PC below, will I have enough PCI Express Lanes or bandwidth to be able to actually achieve 10 Gbps transfer speeds each on the 2 ports of the NIC simultaneously?

PC1:
Intel i7-3770K OC to 4.6 Ghz
Asus Sabertooth Z77
(4GB X2) 8GB DDR3 1866 Mhz XMP Memory
MSI GTX 980 on PCiE 3 x16 port; no other PCiE slots on the motherboard are being used.
2 X 1TB SSDs
1 X 4TB WD Blue HDD
*Want to connect the 10 Gbe Intel X550-T2 NIC on the last (bottom most black slot, #6 as per the manual) PCiE 2 X16 slot.This slot also shares bandwidth with 3 other PCiE 2 x1 slots; non of which are not being used.

PC2:
Intel i7-4790k at Stock Speed
Asus Z97-AR
(8GB X4) 32GB DDR3 1600 Mhz Memory
MSI GTX 980Ti on PCiE 3 x16 port; no other PICE slots on the motherboard are being used.
1X 512GB SSD
2 X 2TB WD Black HDD
*Want to connect the 10 GbE Intel X550-T2 NIC on the second PCiE 3 x16 slot, which means my GTX980ti will be running at x8 instead of x16. According to my internet research, this will not cause any performance drop on GPU.

PC3:
Intel i3-4130
AsRock Z87 Pro 3
(4GB X 2) DDR3 1866 Mhz
1X 512 7200 rpm boot HDD
2X 8TB Seagate Archive v2 HDD
2X 6TB HSGT HDD.
* No PCiE ports are being used on the motherboard. Plan to connect the 10 GbE Intel X550-T2 NIC on the PCiE 3 x16 port.

So, you guys think I can get dual 10 Gbps transfer speeds or will I be bottlenecked by lack of PCI Lanes? The intel X550 Nic needs PCI 3 x4 interface, but I can only provide that in only PC3. The other 2 PCs (PC1 and PC2) will have to use PCiE 2 x16 ports

 

[13thmonkey]

Will you have enough storage speed to make it worthwhile? 600-800MB/s will saturate any of your drives, so is it not a moot point? And at that speed you'll have moved 1TB in about 30mins, so practically speaking anything you want to do will have moved in 10-15mins, of course that only really applies to larger files, smaller files will move a lot more slowly for their size.

Technically no idea if you'll have the PCI-E bandwidth, but you'll probably use it infrequently enough that the time cost for the additional transfer time can be measured in 10's of minutes per week or month as very few people can generate >500GB of data frequently enough for it to be a problem.

It will however outperform Gbe, assuming that the networking setup isn't too big a pain, not touched point to point since 2000.