nVidia onboard lan vs. Dlink DFE-530TX+

[the cobbler]

found it laying around, will this relieve the CPU of networking load?

thanks

 

[Atheus]

don't know how good the chip is, but i find pci cards are always faster than onboard plus it might take a load off your southbridge.

 

[gunblade]

Originally posted by: Atheus
don't know how good the chip is, but i find pci cards are always faster than onboard plus it might take a load off your southbridge.

From my experience, it is the other way around. The built-in lan are using chip interconnects that has more bandwidth than the PCI can provide.

 

[JackMDS]

The early renditions of some of the nVidia on Mobo NIC are somewhat flakey.

However, if the On Board NIC works well, gunblade is right.

As far as Regular Home Networks using client OS goes, the Onboard NIC seems to perform better then a low end PCI NIC.

:sun:

 

[the cobbler]

thanks all:thumbsup:

 

[VirtualLarry]

Unless you have a higher-end board (of the type gunblade mentioned), then most onboard NICs are generally as cheap as possible, without regard to performance, and some of them even suffer from analog noise issues at the PHY layer, just like onboard audio suffers. Then again, many discrete PCI NICs aren't that much better, what with a tiny single chip onboard. I prefer something older, 211xx-based, as a really solid PCI NIC, or an Intel GigE PCI/PCI-X card.

 

[Sunner]

If I'm not mistaken the DFE-530 is using a SysKonnect/Marvell chip.
Those are VERY highly regarded by the OpenBSD folks, and I must say my own experience refelects this.
Simply swapping two Intel EEPro100's for two SK based NIC's(LinkSys) in my home firewall increased performance by quite a bit, with the Intel NIC's it could push around 45 Mbit/sec, with the SK's it went to the full 100 Mbit albeit at pretty much max load 🙂

This EEPro100's aren't exactly pieces of crap either 🙂