Would a NIC be better than onboard ethernet ?

AmAtoL · 02-05-2009, 21:34

As the title says really, is there any benefit at all to having a card rather than using the onboard ethernet ?
I am only interested in gaming performance, all the other stuff I can live with, would it process better or wouldn't I notice any difference ?
At the momoent the onboard is Marvell on an ASUS motherboard.
It seems the NICs have more componenets on the board, compared to what you find on the mobo, just a rule of thumb comparison to try and see why there might be a difference in performance

Cheers

Peter_ · 02-05-2009, 21:37

Quote:

Originally Posted by AmAtoL

As the title says really, is there any benefit at all to having a card rather than using the onboard ethernet ?
I am only interested in gaming performance, all the other stuff I can live with, would it process better or wouldn't I notice any difference ?
At the momoent the onboard is Marvell on an ASUS motherboard.
It seems the NICs have more componenets on the board, compared to what you find on the mobo, just a rule of thumb comparison to try and see why there might be a difference in performance

Cheers

Most onboard ethernet are only 10/100 where you can purchase a a Gigabit card from any good PC vendor for a reasonable price and may give you a slight edge when gaming.

Jon T · 02-05-2009, 22:26

Quote:

Originally Posted by Moldova

Most onboard ethernet are only 10/100 where you can purchase a a Gigabit card from any good PC vendor for a reasonable price and may give you a slight edge when gaming.

Most motherboards that are no more than two years old have onboard gigabit ethernet. Also a gigabit ethernet card will only work at the speed of whatever it's connected to is capable of. It'll not give you any "edge" at all. The NIC will negotiate down to a lower speed if it needs to and totally forget that it's capable faster speeds.

You'll be fine sticking with your onboard NIC, your m'board will have all the dedicated NIC circuitry it needs.

Peter_ · 02-05-2009, 22:28

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jon T

Most motherboards that are no more than two years old have onboard gigabit ethernet. Also a gigabit ethernet card will only work at the speed of whatever it's connected to is capable of. It'll not give you any "edge" at all. The NIC will negotiate down to a lower speed if it needs to and totally forget that it's capable faster speeds.

I am not a gamer so thanks for the information, I was probably aiming at XP machines.

haydnwalker · 02-05-2009, 22:59

Onboard *should* be better as there's less circuit board the data has to travel through (though the performance gains are so negligable that you won't physically see the difference in the real world). You will see no performance advantage of having a PCI/PCIe NIC.

Stick with the onboard, most recent onboard NICs are 10/100/1000 but as has been previously stated, negotiate to the fastest speed your other network kit (routers/switches etc) support.

AmAtoL · 02-05-2009, 23:17

Thanks guys, it is Gigabit at the moment by the way, but I will stay with it now if there is no discernible advantage

Kymmy · 03-05-2009, 07:37

As the internal ports (sound/ethernet/usb/firewaire) all still have to go through the same southbridge as any pci device there's usually no advantage in one or the other...

The only time I use PCI ethernet is for my fixed IP's (hardware MAC based) as I have a few intel NIC's and this allows me to keep the same IP's if anything goes wrong with the server by just swapping the card to the spare machine

dragon · 10-05-2009, 21:04

Quote:

Originally Posted by AmAtoL

As the title says really, is there any benefit at all to having a card rather than using the onboard ethernet ?
I am only interested in gaming performance, all the other stuff I can live with, would it process better or wouldn't I notice any difference ?
At the momoent the onboard is Marvell on an ASUS motherboard.
It seems the NICs have more componenets on the board, compared to what you find on the mobo, just a rule of thumb comparison to try and see why there might be a difference in performance

Cheers

Depends on the Chipset.

I know from my investigations into buildin a pfSense based load balancer that certain realtek chip sets are very much disliked amongst the pfsense community as they use a lot of CPU power once the traffic levels increase (I think it was something to do with the way they handle the TX/RX buffers) and there were a couple intel ones that most people seemed to like.

If you want to know about performance of network cards then asking the community for popular firewall distro's seems to work well as the users using them for bigger networks tend to select hardware based on it's network performance.

That said no reason to buy one of those killer NIC thing's those are just silly IMO.

Druchii · 10-05-2009, 21:46

I have 3 NIC's in my machine, one is onboard 1Gbps connected to another machine via crossover at 1Gbps link speed.
The other two, well, 10/100, one is not used and one is used for connected to the internet.
I can drag files down on both NIC's at roughly the same speed when connected to the other machine... I wouldn't say there's that much of a difference really.

dragon · 10-05-2009, 21:53

Quote:

Originally Posted by Druchii

I have 3 NIC's in my machine, one is onboard 1Gbps connected to another machine via crossover at 1Gbps link speed.
The other two, well, 10/100, one is not used and one is used for connected to the internet.
I can drag files down on both NIC's at roughly the same speed when connected to the other machine... I wouldn't say there's that much of a difference really.

It's not the speed, its the CPU utilization for a given level of throughput and as I said it's only some chipsets that aren't good for it.

Generally you probably wouldn't notice it in a desktop environment but you might on a firewall box.

At 1Gbit I find it's usually the drives that bottleneck before anything else.

altis · 10-05-2009, 22:03

^^^ what he said ^^^

Druchii · 11-05-2009, 05:38

Quote:

Originally Posted by dragon

It's not the speed, its the CPU utilization for a given level of throughput and as I said it's only some chipsets that aren't good for it.

Generally you probably wouldn't notice it in a desktop environment but you might on a firewall box.

At 1Gbit I find it's usually the drives that bottleneck before anything else.

With a 3.6Ghz C2D then i can see why i wouldn't notice a difference. Good call on the firewall box scenario though.

AbyssUnderground · 11-05-2009, 11:19

The only thing a separate NIC is good for is offloading resources to the card's processor rather than using the PC's CPU. Great on slower machines but negligible for todays PC's. You should only need to consider a separate NIC if you need Gigabit and the onboard port doesn't offer it.

haydnwalker · 11-05-2009, 11:34

Quote:

Originally Posted by AbyssUnderground

The only thing a separate NIC is good for is offloading resources to the card's processor rather than using the PC's CPU. Great on slower machines but negligible for todays PC's. You should only need to consider a separate NIC if you need Gigabit and the onboard port doesn't offer it.

Or a hardware proxy server/firewall with 2 NICs?

AbyssUnderground · 11-05-2009, 11:41

Well we're talking in general here, not specialised setups

But yes, you could use 2 or more NIC's in such a setup.