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onboard nic or card

For typical home use you will probably never notice a difference, but if you are really looking for performance from your NIC then Intel based cards are the way to go(either onboard or add-on).
 
Onboard uses the same interface as an add-in card, either PCI or PCIe. The real factor will be the driver and I'd trust Intel over shit companies like Broadcom any day.
 
slick2004 said:
would you get better performance with a seperate nic card as opposed to an onboard nic?
Click to expand...

For average home use, I have not been able to tell the difference between an onboard card, and a expansion / riser card.

Unless your doing something like steaming HD videos from your pc to your home TV, transferring large files across the network,,,,, I doubt your going to see a real difference.

If anything, visit speedguide.net, they have some tweaks you can do to squeeze the most out of your existing card. When I was working as a cable modem tech, I saw customers almost double their speed by installing some of the tweaks at speedguide.
 
Texashiker said:
Unless your doing something like steaming HD videos from your pc to your home TV, transferring large files across the network,,,,, I doubt your going to see a real difference.
Click to expand...

Even then I doubt it, unless he's running something better than a consumer level router.
 
onboard can be just as good as any card as they just are a big single chip with a phy these days. or a dualie. its the name (broadcom/intel) that counts.
 
All the Onboard NICs are Bad.

Regular PCI types are even worse.

The only good NIC is the Killer NIC.

Why? Because it is Big and cost a lot, and today is April 1 (but many people think this way all year around).:hmm:


😎
 
Nothinman said:
Onboard uses the same interface as an add-in card, either PCI or PCIe. The real factor will be the driver and I'd trust Intel over shit companies like Broadcom any day.
Click to expand...

broadcomm makes great nics..don't know what you're talking about. it's the smaller companies like realtek that aren't so good.
 
d33pt said:
broadcomm makes great nics..don't know what you're talking about. it's the smaller companies like realtek that aren't so good.
Click to expand...

All of my experience with them had issues from shit drivers to weirdness with autonegotiation. Intel and 3Com were infinitely better in both respects.
 
As others have mentioned the question really comes down to what you are doing and what the other components are. If you appear to have a network bottleneck then an add-on card CAN make a difference - but that is assuming the bottleneck is not a switch/router.

Networking tends to be one of those areas that can get fuzzy real quickly. In general, I would say try and buy SOHO/SMB geared devices over home ones - you will pay more but it tends to be one of those 'you get what you pay for' sort of situations.

The main issue with most network cards either integrated or add-on is that you are still required to use system resources (ie: processor). Killer NIC has made a bit of a name for themselves as they have an on-board controller which is supposed to handle the load so that your processor doesn't need to. You may see an improvement here if you are taxing your processor.

I would say start off with an integrated and worry about an add-on only if you feel you are having network based limitations. Do some google search for Network Performance Monitors - should give you a general idea on how to setup performance monitors to help get an idea of if you might be running into performance issues.
 
At times One can get better result when using the OEM Drivers

The vendors of NICs don't write the core drivers. They get the basic Drivers from the OEM and customize it to look like theirs.

Sometimes the "rewritten" drivers can be degraded to fit some obscure marketing or quirky hardware agenda.

This was done with Wireless in mind, the first 5 are the Wireless OEMs (they do wire NICs too). With little patient One can find the pages for the Wire NIC too.

Atheros Drivers

http://partner.atheros.com/Drivers.aspx

Broadcom Drivers

http://www.broadcom.com/support/ethernet_nic/downloaddrivers.php

Intel

http://www.intel.com/support/wireless/wlan/sb/cs-010623.htm

Ralink Drivers

http://www.ralinktech.com/support.php?s=1

Realtek

http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/

AFAIK the following do not produce Wireless chipsets, they might produce wire chipset and in their Wireless offers use one of the OEMs above.

3COM

http://support.3com.com/infodeli/tools/nic/index.htm

Marvel-Yukon

http://www.marvell.com/support.html

Scroll Down, to the right there is a Drivers section pull the menu down and choose the Platform.



😎
 
Last edited:
JackMDS said:
The vendors of NICs don't write the core drivers. They get the basic Drivers from the OEM and customize it to look like theirs.

Sometimes the "rewritten" drivers can be degraded to fit some obscure marketing or quirky hardware agenda.
Click to expand...

Which is one reason why Linux wins hard in this area. Every card that uses chipset X uses the same driver regardless of the logo on the box. There's no wondering what you actually have or what OEM Y did to the driver before giving it to you.
 
Nothinman said:
Onboard uses the same interface as an add-in card, either PCI or PCIe. The real factor will be the driver and I'd trust Intel over shit companies like Broadcom any day.
Click to expand...

Intel onboard controllers have special interface that goes directly to southbridge, but it is essentially PCIe interface.
 
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