Is on-board LAN a good thing ?

[Vad3r]

Wondering if I should get onboard lan for new m/b. I'm using some PCI card that came free when I signed up for cable few years back. Would onboard give me better speed than a PCI card.

 

[Theslowone]

Not better speed, well depends on what your cable company offers, most use the same chips found on your network card. Most onboard lan is a realtek rtl8100+. The thing about it is it is there, no expansion slots taken up, no cards that need to be put in and taken out. It doesn' t take away from your system, while it does free up a pci slot to put more crap in.

 

[rondeemc]

I agree with all of the above. It just gives you a cleaner system interior. The only down side is that if it fails you have to rma the whole board but that does not seem to be a common issue. Now that the prices has started to fall on the nforce boards you might want to take a look there. I have a Soyo Dragon and it has been doing well.

 

[Boonesmi]

i like onboard lan for all the reasons listed above, and heck even if for some reason it did fail you could always just add a $15 nic

 

[Borg81]

How do u know if the onboard Lan will fit in your case
my case does not have a space for where the motherboards put it - what do I do?

 

[LS20]

it varies from board to board. my last board was a PCCHips (yea, i know ... ) and it had the worst NIC. it was a Davicom 9012 and that fcker was the cause of all my broadband problems.

My connection was erratic and "moody"... sometimes it would be at full speed, most of the times it would be slow as hell. on ping tests i had a normal loss of 30%. finally i replaced it with a DLink and it was smoking again .


My new ECS board came with a SiS900 NIC and it seems even better than the 3rd-party DLink. I average 10ms pinging to my ISP's webpage as opposed to 17ms with the DLink.

 

[Boonesmi]

if the i/o plate doesnt have a spot for the lan you can always cut it out, but... most new cases come with the place for lan

 

[MadDad]

I agree with LS 20. My ecs board has built-in lan and it works great. They even include a plate for your case that gives you openings to match up with their port layout, which I believe is standard cept for the USB and Lan connections

 

[Theslowone]

I don't think msi comes with the the plate, but i could be wrong. Most do come with the plate for your case.

 

[Strawberrymom]

my gigabyte came with a plate

 

[amdskip]

my soyo came with a plate and I've had zero driver issues too!

 

[Iron Woode]

The PCChips m830LMR board I have kicking around uses the sis900 nic and works great. Comes with the backing plate too.

 

[olin]

Just wondering - what is meant by a Plate on the MB
Best wishes,olin

 

[Athlon4all]

<< Just wondering - what is meant by a Plate on the MB
Best wishes,olin >>

You know the back where all the ports go through (ie USB, Video, Serial, Pararell, Sound, etc) well, the plate is what configures that, and most of them have punch outs for Ethernet above the USB ports, but some don't (the most common one that doesn't is Enlight's 300W ATX Mid-Tower (dunno model number)), but most of them do have the correct shield, and if they don;t, then most mobo's that come with Ethernet comes with a replacement plate any way so.

Oh and I think on-board LAN is great!

 

[mbf]

I believe it's usually called an ATX I/O shield. It's part of the ATX specification so in theory every ATX I/O shield (may it come with the board or the case) should work in every ATX spec'ed case. However, that's theory....
Mostly it works, however!