difference between onboard lan and network card.

[weirdoguy]

 

[weirdoguy]

sorry, i kinda pressed enter, but read the title.
whats the difference between a network card and an onboard lan system on your motherboard?
if you get a network card will you get like a higher download speed rate? will your pages load faster?
or is there practically no difference?

well just a curious question, i need advice, because i cant decide if to use my onboard lan or just buying a new network card thanks

 

[dphantom]

Most motherboards come with onboard NICs today. Unless you have a specific purpose for a second NIC in your system, generally the onboard NIC is perfectly capable.

 

[networkman]

An onboard nic would give you a tighter integration with the chipset the motherboard is based on. And getting a motherboard with an onboard nic is likely to be cheaper than getting a motherboard and network card seperately, because the cost to produce is cheaper with just the motherboard(and onboard nic) as opposed to seperately.

An advantage of onboard nic is that you're not tying up a valuable PCI slot with another device. It it true that some chipsets are more capable than others, but you're not going to see any appreciable difference in speed of loading web pages and normal activities.

 

[weirdoguy]

thanks, you guys, well i guess i'll stick withr my onboard nic. thanks

 

[spidey07]

the only difference would be for server applications and gigabit ethernet (bus speed and offloaded processing to the NIC). A network card could have advantages.

But that is for server class hardware with separate high speed buses pushing 100s of megabits a second.

 

[Nothinman]

An onboard nic would give you a tighter integration with the chipset the motherboard is based on

Which isn't always a good thing, for a nice example of really poor NICs and drivers take a look at the NForce crap.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I have an Integrated "Via Rhine II" ethernet 10/100 controller on my MSI KT4V-L mobo, and honestly, it's crap. It suffers from corruption of packets on the wire; I suspect that it is having the same sort of analog problems with the PHY layer as do most onboard sound chips as well (including this board). That's probably why I get better performance from a 10/100 NIC plugged into a USB (1.1) port. YMMV.

Onboard NIC shouldn't be that bad, but in my case it was. Even if I didn't have the problems with it, I've read in many cases that it is a bit of a dog-slow chip. Just like with onboard sound, onboard LAN tends to eat more CPU cycles than a seperate PCI NIC, although that can depend highly on the chipset too. The best solution, is a high-quality integrated LAN connected to a chipset high-speed bus like Intel's CSA bus, thus not hogging PCI bus bandwidth. It kind of disgusts me though, seeing so many otherwise generally quality mobos, integrating Realtek 10/100/1000 NICs bridged to the PCI bus, with less than great performance. I think because it is now a marketing line-item on the box.

 

[yocki]

i think onboard NIC and lan card are different. I can run citrix metaframe on diskless client with onboard NIC but not with lan card..does anyone knows why this happen ? it seems that with onboard NIC the command "net stop" i have, in my bootdisk, from DOS TCP/ip can be executed. This doesnt happen with lan card.
It turns out that my lan card doesnt have eprom to make it bootable.does anybody know the relation between eprom and the ability to execute "net stop" command from dos ? I dont really understand with the term "bootable lan". does it mean that you boot windows using lancard ?
please. i need help.
in general, i do believe that lancard and onboard nic are different

 

[Nothinman]

I can run citrix metaframe on diskless client with onboard NIC but not with lan card..does anyone knows why this happen ?

Probably because you only have drivers for the onboard card setup on your boot device.

It turns out that my lan card doesnt have eprom to make it bootable.does anybody know the relation between eprom and the ability to execute "net stop" command from dos ?

There is no relationship.

I dont really understand with the term "bootable lan". does it mean that you boot windows using lancard ?

Potentially, but it's extremely difficult with Windows. It's much simpler to boot Linux or even DOS from the network.