Distributed speech recognition (DSR) based on client-server mode means that the recognizer front-end is located in the terminal and is connected over a data network to a remote back-end recognition server. In this paper, we evaluate the distributed speech system in client-server framework based on ETSI AURORA platform for Chinese digits recognition task and compare the performance of client-server mode with the server-only mode where speech is transmitted by using GSM AMR encoder and all recognition processing is done at server side. The recognition result shows that without consideration of channel error the DSR system based on client-server mode can achieve satisfactory recognition accuracy and the lowest bit rate in comparison with sever-only mode.