Would a gigabit switch vastly improve my steam in home streaming experience?

[Fellanah]

I've been debating whether or not to get a gigabit switch so the lan transfer speed would be a lot faster than my 100mbps ports. Could anyone perhaps share their experience with using gigabit ports? and also if it can help play at higher resolutions as currently, I cannot stream 1080p to my host which I found baffling as my host PC was fairly good.. a 4790k 4.4ghz and a 950. On the client side however, is a 3258 and a gt 610. I bought the gt 610 yesterday hoping the gpu encoding would be better than software encoding as stated in here {https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_PureVideo} the 610 does support h264 encoding. probably was a waste. Could my lan speed be the bottleneck here? would using a gigabit port improve my resolution? Any help is appreciated thank you

 

[Ethanh100]

On the client it the performance should all come down to the cpu mainly, and it doesn't have to be very powerful at all, just not terrible. Yes upgrading to gigabit lan would greatly help your streaming, however only if your situation supports it. Do both the server and the client have NICs that are gigabit or faster, and what is the wiring in your walls, if it is cat 5, there will be no change at all as cat 5 can only carry 100mb/s, however if it is cat 5e, it can do gigabit, and cat 6 it can do 10 gigabit. Also is your router capable of gigabit or faster? So if you have cat 6 or 5e in your walls, both ends have fast enough nics, yeah break that 100mb bottleneck.

 

[nukemaster]

100 megabit, while slow for file transfers at 12.5 megabytes/second(you loose a bit for overhead) is fast enough for bluray in realtime. Now as you start doing more and more on the network you will eat into your bandwidth(assuming it is between the same systems) for sure. gigabit is good for 125 megabytes/sec, but you will not quite make the max speed over 100 is pretty easy.

As mentioned above, make sure your wire can handle it.

Even if your router is not gigabit, the switch should bridge the gap(fast internal network and slower internet and whatever else stays on the router).

With all my files on another system, I would hate to go back to 100 megabit for many things,

 

[Fellanah]

On the client it the performance should all come down to the cpu mainly, and it doesn't have to be very powerful at all, just not terrible. Yes upgrading to gigabit lan would greatly help your streaming, however only if your situation supports it. Do both the server and the client have NICs that are gigabit or faster, and what is the wiring in your walls, if it is cat 5, there will be no change at all as cat 5 can only carry 100mb/s, however if it is cat 5e, it can do gigabit, and cat 6 it can do 10 gigabit. Also is your router capable of gigabit or faster? So if you have cat 6 or 5e in your walls, both ends have fast enough nics, yeah break that 100mb bottleneck.

what do you mean NICs? sorry i dont know what that is :c my whole house is wired with cat 5e cables so that shouldnt be a problem switching to gigabit ports. As for my router, its is only capable of 150mbps however, I just want to increase my lan speed to improve the IHS. thank you for this information it really is helpful!

 

[Fellanah]

100 megabit, while slow for file transfers at 12.5 megabytes/second(you loose a bit for overhead) is fast enough for bluray in realtime. Now as you start doing more and more on the network you will eat into your bandwidth(assuming it is between the same systems) for sure. gigabit is good for 125 megabytes/sec, but you will not quite make the max speed over 100 is pretty easy.
As mentioned above, make sure your wire can handle it.

Even if your router is not gigabit, the switch should bridge the gap(fast internal network and slower internet and whatever else stays on the router).
With all my files on another system, I would hate to go back to 100 megabit for many things,

My house is wired with cat-5e cables so it shouldnt be a problem, as long as my devices are connected to the gigabit ports, my lan speed would be gigabit speed? or something close to that? Would my 3258 and gt 610 be enough to be streaming at 1080p if I were to get gigabit speed? thanks for the information though!

 

[nukemaster]

If the file can play on the computer, it can play when streaming.

Even 100 megabit should stream most things without issues(unless you are running uncompressed video.).