I've generally been happy with my Precision 360 until I found the other day that the gigabit network performance was pretty weak.  I'm trying to determine if this is a problem with all Precision 360's or just mine, and if the latter, what component is to blame.  I've already updated drivers and run the Dell diags and found nothing.

 

The problem: when I'm doing any heavy network transfers, the CPU utiliization goes sky high (85%+ on receives, 40%+ on sends) and network throughput is much lower than with other machines on my gigabit network. 

 

Examples:

Any other system sending to the PWS 360: 130Mbit/sec (barely faster than Fast Ethernet!)

PWS 360 sending to any other system: 360Mbit/sec

Any other system to any other system: 550Mbit/sec

 

If anyone wants to check how their system is doing (and greatly help me in the process), try out the PassMark Performance Test (5.0 or 6.0 is fine).  It comes free on the Norton SystemWorks Premier CD, or you can get a 30-day free trial from www.passmark.com.  Simply install it on two machines and you can run the Advanced Network Test (with the default settings) to see how fast machine A can push packets to machine B.

 

Thanks!