Onboard NICs and Add-In Cards

[perdomot]

A lot of mobos these days have two onboard NICs and I was wondering what the advatages of this is. My mobo has a Gbit Lan and I could add another via add-in card but was wondering if I should. Also, do cards have any advantages over mobo NICs? My mobos lan chip is a Marvell 88E8056 phy. Is that a good one? Thanks.

 

[JackMDS]

For Regular Use it Doe Not Matter.

There is No big secret or a conspiracy theory about OnBoard NIC.

It was very inexpensive to add it to the Board and it makes life easy.

 

[spikespiegal]

The only real practical advantage of dual NICs I've found (onboard or otherwise) would be to have multiple gateways. I've used this feature for Windows servers in order to get at multiple WANs or internet connections at the same time so as to avoid a hefty router upgrade. That's about it in my book.

Onboard 'giga-NIC' chips do take a performance hit over Enterprise class gigabit cards, especially the higher performing Intels. Also, the integrated giga-NICs on your typical Blade server motherboard are a substantial upgrade over your enthusiast Asus/Foxconn/Gigabyte, etc.

However, you aren't likely to notice much difference unless you are constantly moving big files that aren't already saturating your disk system I/O.

I have noticed that *good*, dedicated PCI NIC cards tend to be a bit more reliable than integrated NICs on enthusiast motherboards.

 

[perdomot]

I download a lot of video torrents and have had to occasionally reboot the system because I can't connect to the internet. Even adjusting upload speed doesn't prevent this from happening once in a while so a PCI card does look attractive to me. Was thinking of getting one from Netgear as my router is from them.

 

[Fardringle]

That's much more likely to be caused by your router and not by your network card. Torrent programs create thousands of open connections and that can easily overload a consumer level router until the connections are closed (by rebooting your computer, for example).