We ran gigabit cable to all the rooms in my house (minus bathrooms and the kitchen) this last weekend.

Made sense to do it since the 1000feet of cable i got was free...

Anyway, ive got my XBox, and 2 computers hooked up to 3 seperate jacks, and all coming out in the office to connect to the router. Does anyone know how much it would cost to upgrade the computer NICs (3 computers: mine, my sisters, and the office computer) to gigabit? Is there anything else I should upgrade while Im at it?

Pricewatch lists gigabit NIC's as around 15 bucks online.

However, is the router gigabit? If not, then it's pretty pointless.

do you need to run new cables for gigabit? or do the same ethernet cables work?

Cat5e will support the gigabit ethernet.. yet the new standard is cat6
Cat5e cables have been around for awhile, my work has it all wired but they are still running an 10/100switch

heres more info -- http://www.lanshack.com/cat5e-tutorial.asp

I didnt work with Giga byte networks before, but i wonder how is the defference between it and the 100 mb LAN, cause there is a hard disk limitation of course and the transfer on 100 mb lan seems close to the maximum transfer of the data in a 5400 rpm Hard disks, so anyone worked with them enough to judge about the noticable defference in performance ?

I think yur confused. a 10/100 mb/s Lan runs at a max of a 100 megabits/sec or 12.5 megabytes/sec megabits* 8=MB. A hard drive even at ata33 has a maximum throughtput of 33 megabytes per second which = 264 mbits/sec. A gigabit network has a maximum thropughput of 125 megabytes per second so at ata133 the hard drive still wouldnt create a bottleneck. It could still feed the info at 1064 megabits/sec.

See here and here for terminology.

Also all this is dependant on them running at their theoretical maximum throughputs which they arent going to of course, but I still dont see the hardrive as being a bottleneck on a gigabyte lan.

G.i.P

It can be confusing at times knowing which is bit and which is byte but as long as it's correctly writted Megabits should be written as mb or Mb, whereas MegaBytes would be written as MB. Unfortunately that depends on the person writing it knowing what the hell they're on about.

There is also the Mib and the MiB which is Mebibit and Mebibyte which uses bytes of 1000 as opposed to the usual 1024. Hard drives often use this so an 80GB hard drive is really an 80GiB hard drive with 80'000'000'000 bytes instead of the 85'899'345'920 bytes you would expect which is why onnce you plonk you 80GB in you might be surprised to find it only comes up as 75.5GB

Well byte is 8 bit, its not the point i was asking about the defference in performance and thanks so much GiPWeb your infromation is useful for me.

Yep, I believe they call one of them a binary byte and the other a decimal byte. HD companies can use them to make their harddrives sound larger

Yeah the hard drives are marketed in base 10 and the computer reads them in base 2. It's the same amount of space, just represented differently.

I think so its more of notation standard adapted by the respective industry. Such as storage industry use "byte" notation, while communication industry uses "bit" notation. However, I can be wrong.