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    HP T5740 gigabit over PCIx

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    • B
      biggsy
      last edited by

      For some reason this project got me interested and I did a bit of research today.

      Your IBM card is a 3.3V 64-bit PCI-X.  The riser with the white connector is a 5V 32-bit PCI .

      So I don't think you'll have much joy there, unless you feel like going down this path.  Of course, you could just end up frying the card.

      Overall the PCIe riser and dual-port NC360T might be easier and quicker.

      Good luck and please let us know the outcome.

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      • stephenw10S
        stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
        last edited by

        Ah, of course. I always forget about the voltage!  ::) I guess it's so infrequently something that you have to worry about these days. Filing out the 3.3V notch seems pretty extreme to me. In the worst case you could damage both the card and the motherboard doing that.

        Steve

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        • W
          w1ll1am
          last edited by

          Well lol I got everything over the weekend and I did cut out the notch. That had been my plan the entire time never even thought about it really causing a problem. So unfortunately I don't have pictures at the moment but I will try to get some today. It was an extremely tight fit. I was able to get the HDD (XBox 360 20 gig), 4 port Intel NIC and wireless intel NIC all installed and all was recognized. Everything has been up and running since Saturday. Not sure what I am going to do with the wireless card kind of put it in just because I could. I am only using 2 of the 4 ports on the card at the moment so not sure how it will act once I use them all.

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          • stephenw10S
            stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
            last edited by

            Nice. A good result all round then.  :)
            Post some throughput numbers if you do any testing, always useful.

            Steve

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            • W
              w1ll1am
              last edited by

              @stephenw10:

              Nice. A good result all round then.  :)
              Post some throughput numbers if you do any testing, always useful.

              Steve

              I have Time Warner Cable internet I am paying for 15 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up. I didn't test the upload but I did a test on IPv6 and IPv4 below are the results. The IPv6 is slower.

              IPv4
              [2.1.3-RELEASE][admin@pfsense.scanlon]/root(4): fetch -o /dev/null http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test
              /dev/null                                    100% of  100 MB 1713 kBps 00m00s

              IPv6
              [2.1.3-RELEASE][admin@pfsense.scanlon]/root(5): fetch -o /dev/null http://ipv6.download.thinkbroadband.com/100MB.zip
              /dev/null                                    100% of  100 MB 1343 kBps 00m00s

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              • stephenw10S
                stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                last edited by

                That's really just limited by your WAN speed then. A more interesting test would be between two internal interfaces, both on the PCI-X card.

                Steve

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                • W
                  w1ll1am
                  last edited by

                  @stephenw10:

                  That's really just limited by your WAN speed then. A more interesting test would be between two internal interfaces, both on the PCI-X card.

                  Steve

                  I was looking at ways to test that. I came across iperf so I am going to try it out later. I will post my results

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                  • W
                    w1ll1am
                    last edited by

                    iperf results (This is between a client and pfsense) I am doing this remotely so I only have access to pfsense and the client I am typing on now.

                    Pfsense was the server.

                    TCP test

                     iperf -c 192.168.1.1 -t 20 -w 100k -P 20
                    

                    Output

                    
                    [ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
                    [  6]  0.0-20.0 sec  40.8 MBytes  17.1 Mbits/sec
                    [  7]  0.0-20.0 sec  34.6 MBytes  14.5 Mbits/sec
                    [ 12]  0.0-20.0 sec  34.6 MBytes  14.5 Mbits/sec
                    [  5]  0.0-20.0 sec  36.2 MBytes  15.2 Mbits/sec
                    [  4]  0.0-20.0 sec  41.4 MBytes  17.3 Mbits/sec
                    [ 17]  0.0-20.1 sec  36.9 MBytes  15.4 Mbits/sec
                    [ 20]  0.0-20.0 sec  43.6 MBytes  18.3 Mbits/sec
                    [ 16]  0.0-20.1 sec  37.9 MBytes  15.8 Mbits/sec
                    [ 22]  0.0-20.1 sec  35.5 MBytes  14.8 Mbits/sec
                    [  9]  0.0-20.1 sec  37.0 MBytes  15.4 Mbits/sec
                    [ 19]  0.0-20.1 sec  40.2 MBytes  16.8 Mbits/sec
                    [  8]  0.0-20.1 sec  34.6 MBytes  14.4 Mbits/sec
                    [ 13]  0.0-20.1 sec  41.9 MBytes  17.4 Mbits/sec
                    [ 10]  0.0-20.2 sec  41.4 MBytes  17.2 Mbits/sec
                    [  3]  0.0-20.2 sec  40.6 MBytes  16.9 Mbits/sec
                    [ 15]  0.0-20.2 sec  40.0 MBytes  16.6 Mbits/sec
                    [ 11]  0.0-20.2 sec  28.4 MBytes  11.8 Mbits/sec
                    [ 14]  0.0-20.2 sec  31.9 MBytes  13.3 Mbits/sec
                    [ 21]  0.0-20.2 sec  24.8 MBytes  10.3 Mbits/sec
                    [ 18]  0.0-20.2 sec  26.6 MBytes  11.0 Mbits/sec
                    [SUM]  0.0-20.2 sec   729 MBytes   302 Mbits/sec
                    
                    

                    Max was 302 Mbps

                    UDP Test

                    
                    iperf -c 192.168.1.1 -u -b 300m
                    
                    

                    Output

                    
                    Client connecting to 192.168.1.1, UDP port 5001
                    Sending 1470 byte datagrams
                    UDP buffer size:  160 KByte (default)
                    ------------------------------------------------------------
                    [  3] local 192.168.1.2 port 57996 connected with 192.168.1.1 port 5001
                    [ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
                    [  3]  0.0-10.0 sec   346 MBytes   290 Mbits/sec
                    [  3] Sent 246971 datagrams
                    [  3] Server Report:
                    [  3]  0.0-10.0 sec   346 MBytes   290 Mbits/sec   0.017 ms   14/246970 (0.0057%)
                    [  3]  0.0-10.0 sec  1 datagrams received out-of-order
                    
                    

                    I am pretty happy with the results. Looks like the CPU is the bottle neck. Ran the TCP test for 200 seconds it transferred 6.83 Gigabytes of data at 293Mbps and the CPU was maxed out.

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                    • stephenw10S
                      stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                      last edited by

                      Interesting thanks. Be interesting to see how that compares with running thd server and client on separate mchines behind pfSense on separate interfaces.

                      Steve

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                      • W
                        w1ll1am
                        last edited by

                        @stephenw10:

                        Interesting thanks. Be interesting to see how that compares with running thd server and client on separate mchines behind pfSense on separate interfaces.

                        Steve

                        My plan was to try that when I get home. I will let you know.

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                        • W
                          w1ll1am
                          last edited by

                          two PCs on the same LAN, same pfsense port.

                           [SUM]  0.0-20.1 sec  2.16 GBytes   926 Mbits/sec 
                          

                          two PCs on two different NIC ports

                            [SUM]  0.0-20.0 sec   941 MBytes   394 Mbits/sec  
                          
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                          • stephenw10S
                            stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                            last edited by

                            Actually faster than just receiving the traffic. I guess it's definitely CPU bound then.
                            A further interesting test would be to enable IP fastforwarding. That may or may not have a dramatic effect on traffiic that is passed through the box but not terminated there.
                            It's enabled in System: Advanced: System Tunables:. Set the net.inet.ip.fastforwarding tunable to 1. You may have to reboot to activate that. Be aware that setting that value WILL break IPSec pass-through so if you need that disable it again after the test.

                            Steve

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                            • W
                              w1ll1am
                              last edited by

                              It seems that maybe I am wrong. The CPU will max out only when using the pfsense box as the server. I wasn't watching it when looking at the above tests. I set the fast-forward option and get about the same speeds. I believe the best was 394Mbps. The CPU only reached 67% and only for a moment the average for the 20 second test was probably 63%. So I am guessing that the PCI bus? is limiting the card to ~400Mbps?

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                              • stephenw10S
                                stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                                last edited by

                                Yes. You might expect a maximum throughput of half the bandwidth which would be ~512Mbps however that doesn't allow for any return traffic, error-correction, ACKs etc. Did you see any reduction in CPU use with IP fastforwarding enabled?

                                Steve

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                                • W
                                  w1ll1am
                                  last edited by

                                  Pictures of the box. it was a pretty tight fit. I had to cut the SATA cable strain relief so it would bend enough when the PCI right angel adapter pressed on it. Tried uploading these pictures to this post but they were too big.

                                  https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2OPLQVuFuhDNFh0WmhhazJrUmJHUngxM0FHR1BiQjRLTUZv/edit?usp=sharing

                                  https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2OPLQVuFuhDbF9xdEdkbGtwaWdzTTlvbW9MWWN5bVg1QmVR/edit?usp=sharing

                                  https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2OPLQVuFuhDSUJJMzZYVHU5SkwtNk9jcGtxWTBaRWNvUnFr/edit?usp=sharing

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                                  • R
                                    Riddler652
                                    last edited by

                                    Looks great - one question - where did you get the power from to run your fan?

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