Onboard NIC onboard sound

[BadMrFrosty]

OK with all this 'Killer NIC' madness going on today it got me wondering, does it really matter whether your NIC is on-board or off-board, and also does it matter if your sound is onboard or off board..

Does the NIC being on-board use some of the resources that it otherwise wouldn't use? or does the off board's nic having to send everything through the bus slow it down?

also the same question about sound, does the onboard sound slow the box down more/less than an off board solution?

I'm specifically speaking about the Intel D975BX

any advice?

thanks,
drew

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: BadMrFrosty
OK with all this 'Killer NIC' madness going on today it got me wondering, does it really matter whether your NIC is on-board or off-board, and also does it matter if your sound is onboard or off board..

Does the NIC being on-board use some of the resources that it otherwise wouldn't use? or does the off board's nic having to send everything through the bus slow it down?

also the same question about sound, does the onboard sound slow the box down more/less than an off board solution?

I'm specifically speaking about the Intel D975BX

any advice?

thanks,
drew

For home internet speeds, onboard versus offboard Ethernet is pretty much irrelevant. Probably the difference is just 1-2% of CPU usage, if even that.

If you have a gigabit LAN and you want to push files around in your home, a chipset with a TOE (TCP/IP Offload Engine) can significantly reduce CPU load. Note that some "onboard" NICs may have one of these, and are often very fast (since they're connected directly to the northbridge)! On boards with two gigabit NICs built in, one is frequently faster than the other.

Bus bandwidth can also be an issue for very high-speed networks. Regular PCI is ~133MBps, so it's barely enough for a 1Gbps Ethernet connection at full speed. With PCIe, it's generally not an issue unless you are connecting to multiple 1Gbps networks.

For sound, it's a little more complicated. "gaming" sound cards often have hardware support for doing 3D positional audio -- you can emulate it on the CPU, but it will eat up some CPU cycles. If your CPU isn't that fast and you plan on playing games that are sensitive to CPU speed, it could slow it down a bit. For just normal playing of audio files, or even recording stuff, the differences are very, very small.

 

[dfuze]

There was a lengthy discussion about this in the Video area a while back. Also, Anandtech did a pretty good write up on the Killer NIC too. You might want to try to search for those two things. In essence, it was mercilessly beat up on the boards for costing a lot of money and not doing much if anything because there were variables that the card does not account for (server side).

 

[SparkyJJO]

Onboard LAN at this point is just as good as any other offboard LAN anymore for the most part (the killer NIC is just stupid waste of money IMO). Sound though I still use a sound card, I noticed the difference in switching from my onboard realtek Azalia HD audio to my Audigy 2 ZS.

 

[sjandrewbsme]

In short - the killer NIC is a waste of money. It does onboard prioritization (or some other type hooey) that will result in a minor drop in ping and increase in FPS. HOWEVER, both improvements are statisitically insignificant and not really perceptable anyway.