PCI vs PCI-E onboard NIC noticeable?

[Xarick]

is the average home user connected to a cable network going to notice any speed difference between PCI and PCI-E based NIC cards built onto the motherboard? What advantage does PCI-E base have? Is it still better to use a stand alone nic? (I have been using a netgear nic for about 4 years fa-311). Is the processor overhead of onboard similar to stand alone?

 

[shabby]

You need the $300 killer nic, it'll speed up your web surfing by 0.000001%!!!!!

Any nic will do, theres really no difference between a pci/pcie or onboard nic.

 

[Matthias99]

For home-user internet speeds, it's not really relevant. Onboard may use a percent or two of CPU time when transferring big files.

If you want to push files around on a network at 1000Mbps, having a card with an offload engine can help a lot in terms of CPU usage, and a single PCI-based gigabit Ethernet card will eat up pretty much all your PCI bandwidth. So if you have other PCI devices, or you need multiple gigabit links, you will have to use PCI-X or PCIe NICs.