I have currently a evga 780i and I was wondering if I should keep the onboard or get a third party intel nic. I use it for every so often heavy network file transfers. I do lan gameplay and online gameplay. My whole network is gigabit. Also the only slot that will be available is regular pci. I also have a q9300 since onboard usually offloads to cpu.
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NIC vs. Onboard Gigabit LAN
- Thread starter hennessy1
- Start date
There's another thread on this topic which has some info and opinions that I and others have posted:
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...=2186017&enterthread=y
Again, my opinion is that the NIC doesn't matter much for Windows file sharing, until you start to hit the high end of file transfer performance. At the high end, all the little details add up, including NIC tuning and selection. Until then, the OS, HD, and other factors will typically significantly out-weigh the NIC and everything else at the network level for gigabit.
nVIDIA NICs can certainly approach gigabit saturation and have been able to do that for a long time already. There is one major tuning option for nVIDIA NICs in the versions/drivers that I've seen -- "Optimize for:" "CPU" or "Throughput". The best suggestion I have is to try both values and measure file transfer performance; if you don't want to do real testing, just leave it at the default. I've seen "CPU" perform best in one chipset, and "Throughput" in another.
To me, it doesn't make much sense to go from a native NIC to a PCI NIC. There are many good things to be said about Intel NICs; about their driver support, feature set, etc., but when you're dealing with simple file transfers and a NIC which can already approach gigabit saturation without incurring PCI issues, IMO it doesn't make a lot of sense to spend money for another that often performs less well just because of the PCI bus and its related implementation.
Of course, others will differ, for various reasons, but I've yet to see anyone back that up with convincing numbers and testing details. In my own testing, pre-Vista, PCI NICs have typically underperformed native NICs for file transfers at the high end, and often not made much of a difference at the low to mid range of performance.
Of course, reality is quite varied and messy -- with tuning options, effects, driver versions and defaults changing, it's quite possible to sometimes see apparently significant changes with just the change of a NIC although this isn't the general rule.
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...=2186017&enterthread=y
Again, my opinion is that the NIC doesn't matter much for Windows file sharing, until you start to hit the high end of file transfer performance. At the high end, all the little details add up, including NIC tuning and selection. Until then, the OS, HD, and other factors will typically significantly out-weigh the NIC and everything else at the network level for gigabit.
nVIDIA NICs can certainly approach gigabit saturation and have been able to do that for a long time already. There is one major tuning option for nVIDIA NICs in the versions/drivers that I've seen -- "Optimize for:" "CPU" or "Throughput". The best suggestion I have is to try both values and measure file transfer performance; if you don't want to do real testing, just leave it at the default. I've seen "CPU" perform best in one chipset, and "Throughput" in another.
To me, it doesn't make much sense to go from a native NIC to a PCI NIC. There are many good things to be said about Intel NICs; about their driver support, feature set, etc., but when you're dealing with simple file transfers and a NIC which can already approach gigabit saturation without incurring PCI issues, IMO it doesn't make a lot of sense to spend money for another that often performs less well just because of the PCI bus and its related implementation.
Of course, others will differ, for various reasons, but I've yet to see anyone back that up with convincing numbers and testing details. In my own testing, pre-Vista, PCI NICs have typically underperformed native NICs for file transfers at the high end, and often not made much of a difference at the low to mid range of performance.
Of course, reality is quite varied and messy -- with tuning options, effects, driver versions and defaults changing, it's quite possible to sometimes see apparently significant changes with just the change of a NIC although this isn't the general rule.
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