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XPS 13-9370, speed of the network card?
I've been running at better than 750Kbps for the last couple of months in my apartment in eastern France. I have recently upgraded my internet connection to 10 Gbps (one of the local carriers is now offering 10 Gig connections). The installer was, unfortunately, incompetent and now I'm getting only around 80-250Kbps via WiFi. So I'm thinking of connecting directly to the box (there's a 10Gb connector on the back of the vendor's "server" box). Can I just run a Cat 7 Ethernet cable from the server to the Dell, plus a suitable USB C-to-Ethernet adapter, and expect to get my 10 Gig connection? In particular, is the stock network card in the laptop rated at 10 Gbps and if so, can anyone suggest an adapter that goes Cat 7 to USB C? So far, I've only seen Cat 5e connectors, which are bigger than the Cat 7.
jphughan
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May 13th, 2019 07:00
@fractalbobu no the WiFi card does not support 10 Gbps. No laptop Wi-Fi cards currently on the market even come close to that. Even the very latest Intel AX200 WiFi card that supports the brand new 802.11ax WiFi standard "only" supports up to 2.4 Gbps as a theoretical max, but a) the XPS 13 9370 doesn't have that card, and b) you wouldn't actually see that performance in the real world even if you DID have that card AND a brand new high-end 802.11ax router.
As I said above, the only way to get 10 Gb Internet bandwidth down to your system would be through a 10 Gb Ethernet adapter, and the only way to use one of those without the connection between the adapter and your laptop being the bottleneck would be to use Thunderbolt 3. Technically USB 3.1 Gen 2 (also 10 Gbps) could be used between the adapter and system, but then you'll lose performance to USB's protocol overhead, so you wouldn't get the full 10 Gb Ethernet connection -- but as of this writing I haven't seen a 10 Gb Ethernet adapter that uses USB 3.1 Gen 2.
One option you might want to consider waiting for are USB 2.5 Gb or 5 Gb adapters, which use a standard called "NBase-T". They should be quite a bit less expensive than full 10 Gb adapters and would not require Thunderbolt 3, making them usable with more systems, but obviously they won't carry as much bandwidth -- and your network switch or whatever device you're plugging into will have to support NBase-T too. The fact that it supports 10 Gb does not mean it would support 2.5 Gb or 5 Gb because these new NBase-T standards were developed more recently specifically because 10 Gb has remained more expensive to implement for longer than people anticipated.
But as I said above, even if you had that hardware, the idea that you'd be able to fully utilize 10 Gb Internet connection from a single system isn't realistic. First, you'd be unlikely to find any server or any combination of servers that will result in you saturating a 10 Gbps connection just from your system, whether you're downloading or uploading. Second, even if you did, on downloads the write speed of your SSD could become a limiting factor. 10 Gbps is 1.25 GB/s, and even an NVMe SSD might have some difficulty sustaining that performance for a prolonged period. It really doesn't make sense to try to use a 10 Gb Internet connection entirely from one system, in my opinion. It MIGHT make sense to have a 10 Gbps connection to your location if you have other systems that will also be running, but if your laptop is the only device on your network that will be doing anything bandwidth-intensive on a regular basis, then you're probably just throwing money away.
jphughan
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May 10th, 2019 07:00
The only network card built into the XPS 13 9370 is WiFi. If you want a wired Ethernet connector, there are indeed adapters that will plug into the USB-C port, but those have the Ethernet controller built into the adapter itself, so you'd be subject to whatever limitations existed in the adapter's controller. If you want 10 Gbps, you wouldn't be able to get full performance even with an adapter that supported connecting to the system over USB 3.1 Gen 2, which is 10 Gbps on paper but never comes close to its theoretical max due to protocol overhead -- although I don't know of a 10 Gbps USB-C adapter anyway. The only 10 Gbps adapter you could use would be one that connected to the USB-C port but used the much faster Thunderbolt 3 protocol, like this one. The XPS 13 9370 does have two Thunderbolt 3-capable USB-C ports, so you could use that, but as you can see, that adapter is much larger and quite a bit more expensive than typical Gigabit Ethernet adapters, which are plentiful. You might want to ask yourself whether you'd actually be doing anything on that system that would even benefit from having the full 10 Gbps bandwidth available to that one system. The vast majority of websites you'd visit would have difficulty even fully utilizing a 1 Gbps Internet connection, so you'd need to be doing massively parallel downloading in order to even hope to fully utilize a 10 Gbps Internet connection, and doing it all on that one system to justify having a 10 Gbps connection to that one system.
On that subject, are you sure you have your bandwidth units correct? The reason I ask is that they both sound completely implausible. First, even a 1 Gb Internet connection is rare. 10 Gb is practically unheard of outside of large companies. And even if that's right, you're only getting 250 KILObits per second, rather than MEGAbits? If those numbers are both correct, it would mean your Internet connection is 40,000 times faster than you're currently getting, which doesn't seem possible.
Lastly, about CAT 7. First, the CAT rating refers to the cable itself, not the connector. The connector most commonly used for Ethernet is called RJ-45, although there are other connector types. I don't know what CAT 7 cable you're looking at that has a smaller connector than "CAT 5e", by which I assume you mean a CAT 5e cable with a standard RJ-45 connector. But more importantly, you don't even need CAT 7 cable. CAT 6 cable is rated for 10 Gbps up to 30 meters, and CAT 6A is rated for 10 Gbps up to 100 meters. CAT 7 has a lot of extra shielding that's meant to maintain signal integrity in cable-dense deployments like datacenters (which might explain why you found a CAT 7 cable with an unusual connector), but all of that shielding will just make for a much heavier, less flexible cable in your case.
fractalbobu
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May 13th, 2019 01:00
Hi, and thanks for your reply. First of all, regarding the bandwidth, here in France, 1 Gbps is common. When I moved to Strasbourg the end of February 2019, my girlfriend was already getting 750 Mbps (I measured it with Ookla speed test) and I was used to a 1 Gig connection before I left California, since I was a Sonic Internet customer. So when I heard that Free.fr was rolling out 10 Gig connections, I couldn't wait (I manage a blog and routinely upload large files, including videos, so a fast connection is important to me).
After the Free installer installed the 10 Gbps upgrade module, our speed actually dropped, to between 75 and 250 Mbps (sorry, I meant mega, not kilo!). My uploads ground almost to a standstill. Now that other customers have reported similar problems, the company is looking into what may be defective hardware.
I was considering connecting the 10 Gbps server to my Dell via Ethernet only because I thought I would have to, in order to get my 10 Gig connection, but as long as the Server outputs data at 10 Gbps and the Dell Wi-Fi card supports the same speed, I'm good. My question was about the Dell. Are you saying that the Wi-Fi card supports 10 Gbps?
DELL-Chris M
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May 13th, 2019 05:00
For my Dell internal notes...
* Click my name and private message me the XPS 13-9370 service tag number
* From whom and when did you purchase this XPS 13-9370?
* Did you move the "ownership" of the XPS 13-9370 from your USA address to your Strasbourg, France address using the online form?
jphughan
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May 13th, 2019 09:00
@fractalbobujust fyi in your statement above, you're assuming that Google -- and for that matter all interconnects between your location and Google's infrastructure -- will be willing to allow your single connection to consume 10 Gb of their available bandwidth, even if they have it available in the first place. That will not necessarily be the case.
fractalbobu
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May 13th, 2019 09:00
That may well be, but even if I only get 3-4 GB, it would be worth it to me, since the price (59 euros per month, with Netflix thrown in) is pretty cheap.
fractalbobu
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May 13th, 2019 09:00
Hi, Chris,
Clicking your name only took me to your profile page and I didn't see any way to send you a private message (unless this message is private). Email would be the easiest way to communicate, but I didn't see your email address anywhere on the page. Found it! Private Message sent.
Anyway, I plan to only upload to Google and their servers are certainly fast enough to handle 10 Gb uploads, so I guess I'll go the wired route that was suggested.
Regards,
fractalbobu
DELL-Chris M
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May 13th, 2019 11:00
I sent you a Private Message reply discussing the still valid warranty.
The Killer Wireless-AC 1435 WiFi specifications are as follows =
WiFi 802.11ac 2x2 Dual band 2.4GHz/5.0GHz + Bluetooth 4.2
Data Rates Up to 867 Mbps (megabit per second), 108 MB/s, MBps (megabyte per second)