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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

What do you expect to do with the steam machine that will take more than a gigabit? I mean, it's cool when things are faster, but if you can saturate the link, downloads are still bottlenecked by the drives. And even 4k streaming is under 100Mbit normally.

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I can download at approximately 2.5 Gbps from Steam on my PC.

I think not having a 2.5 gigabit port at least is a poor choice.

there is almost no one who has multigigabit internet and even for people that do, you spend significantly less than 1 percent of your time on that device downloading. its a complete non issue. this device is a midrange at best pc, so having a gigabit connection is exactly where it should be. if you want to have the best of the best build a pc.

That's an exaggeration. Affordable multi-gigabit fiber is widely available in plenty of metropolitan areas in the US and Europe and mid-range motherboards have included 2.5 GbE for years now and the NICs themselves are dirt cheap. I don't think it's irrational to be disappointed.

>Affordable multi-gigabit fiber is widely available in plenty of metropolitan areas in the US

Press X to doubt, isn’t a large part of country under Comcast (aka crappy monopolistic cable)?

I have >1 gbps service from them.

That's why I specified that it's widely available in plenty of metropolitan areas, not a large part of the country. Internet service absolutely is abysmal in the US as a whole, but many large cities do have affordable access to fiber.

This is not true, at least around where I live. Gigabit ethernet(which is gigabit for only the downloads, and <50 mbps for upload) is 110$ per month. Comcast is the only internet service provider who offers speeds over 50 mbps. So I make due. If I want to download a 40gb game, I take a break. I read a book, or eat dinner. It works itself out, and I can play my game.

2.5Gbit via PON fiber is getting common, but you won't get that from Comcast. US isn't great at internet speeds anyway. I've had symmetric 1gbit for ages here in EU and you can even get 10g in some places.

My point was that 1 Gbps+ internet is available in enough select metropolitan areas that saying "almost no one has it" is inaccurate, not that it's widely available everywhere to the average user.

Obviously the subset of users with multi-gig fiber is relatively small, but not practically zero like the comment suggested. Anecdotally, 3 Gbps fiber is widely available in my medium sized US city of about ~500k for as low as $110. I paid the same for asymmetrical gigabit cable internet in the last city I lived. It just depends.

So you can theoretically download an AAA title like the new kingdom come at 84GB in just under 5 minutes instead of 11 min. That's cool and all, but does it actually matter? I mean, with games of those sizes you're going to spend hundreds of hours in the game most likely. It's an extremely first world problem that takes minutes, maybe once a month.

It's more so the fact that 2.5 GbE NICs are really cheap and already fairly common in consumer devices. And game downloads aren't the only use case, file transfers could benefit from the extra headroom

A USB 2.5Gb adapter costs $15 on Amazon.

> And even 4k streaming is under 100Mbit normally

Are you talking "4k streaming" as the current streaming providers do it, with trash bitrate, or "4k streaming" as you would do it if you had ripped your own blu-ray disks and you want to stream it from a NAS somewhere else in your house to your living room?

The extreme high quality blurays are going up to 144Mbps or so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_HD_Blu-ray Still nowhere near a gigabit.

The highest bitrate UHD Blu-ray supports is 144mbit/s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_HD_Blu-ray. A one gigabit NIC is not even close to the biggest compromise on this system.

"the average bitrate for a 4K Blu-ray DVD can range between 48Mbps to 75Mbps. Some discs can also carry around 100Mbps or even 128Mbps, but these are more rare."

https://www.tomsguide.com/tvs/forget-streaming-services-here...

Even on the high seas the large Blu-ray releases require only about 40-50Mbit, maybe you can get even larger releases (requiring ~100Mbit for streaming) but then a single movie would take up 100GB+ of space and it is such an overkill, no one really needs it.

Games are super large nowadays. IIRC Steam uses P2P for the update downloads, so you should be able to saturate whatever link you have, and the SSD should be substantially faster than 1Gbps. So anyone that has a > 1Gbps internet connection should benefit from something higher than Gigabit.

How are downloads bottlenecked by drives? A normal nvme drive does >20 gbit.

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