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Intel gigabit PCI-E NIC $43

what's really the performance difference between onboard gigabit and PCIe gigabit?

i'd tend to think onboard gigabit would be faster, in which this is a horrible deal since nearly all new motherboards come with gigabit onboard, might as well spend the $40 on your new motherboard
 
Originally posted by: ProsperoLT
what's really the performance difference between onboard gigabit and PCIe gigabit?

i'd tend to think onboard gigabit would be faster, in which this is a horrible deal since nearly all new motherboards come with gigabit onboard, might as well spend the $40 on your new motherboard
Click to expand...

One post on AVS Forum (HD Home run thread, IIRC) said the opposite. I.e. onboard GigE chips aren't that good. I believe that poster preferred the Intel cards. I'm not an expert, so I'm not sure myself.
 
I believe most motherboards use the PCI bus therefore the throughput of the gigabit nic is not nearly what it could be and if you have anything else in a PCI slot throughput is even worse.
 
To top it all off, using any onboard component will take up resources from the processor.

For best performance it is usually recommended to get NICs, Sound cards, Video cards, that do the processing for the most part themselves, unloading the cpu for other functions.
 
Originally posted by: kenji4life
To top it all off, using any onboard component will take up resources from the processor.

For best performance it is usually recommended to get NICs, Sound cards, Video cards, that do the processing for the most part themselves, unloading the cpu for other functions.
Click to expand...

Most NICs in the $20-$100 range don't have on-board processing to offload the network heavy lifting from the CPU to the NIC, so it really doesn't matter.

Given a modern CPU and Windows' Recieve Side Scaling - and given dual core - offloading this from the CPU just isn't a big deal anymore for most people. It isn't as if you'll see a significant difference when doing anything, unless your CPU happens to be running a Citrix server farm...

One can make somewhat similar arguments for sound cards, many of which do much of the processing on the CPU, not the sound card. It's really the video card that's made the big industry of offloading CPU->GPU.
 
@katana - gigabit max throughput is only 125MB/s i believe which doesn't even max out the PCI standard, much less PCIe
@kenji - network load at most would be <1-2% processor time and completely negligible in terms of performance if you have a dual-core cpu

not only that, but onboard NIC's are hard-wired into the PCI/PCIe bus and on-die which should speed up the transfer speed over an add-on card

i'm just curious because i am after the best performance too but i don't want to use up a PCIe slot (if i get better performance from my onboard gigabit)
 
Originally posted by: ProsperoLT
@katana - gigabit max throughput is only 125MB/s i believe which doesn't even max out the PCI standard, much less PCIe
@kenji - network load at most would be <1-2% processor time and completely negligible in terms of performance if you have a dual-core cpu

not only that, but onboard NIC's are hard-wired into the PCI/PCIe bus and on-die which should speed up the transfer speed over an add-on card

i'm just curious because i am after the best performance too but i don't want to use up a PCIe slot (if i get better performance from my onboard gigabit)
Click to expand...

Look at some of anandtechs mobo reviews on PCI vs PCIe Gb nics, and there is a significant throughput/processor utilization difference. PCIe onboard is going to be similar to this card, I think.

Also, most value boards don't come with the NIC integrated into the southbridge, it is an add on chip to provide that functionality.

Nat
 
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