POLL: Onboard LAN or dedicated NIC? which is better?

[Lifer]

the question is which is better.

uses include online gaming, heavy browsing, and hefty file transfers, all while multitasking.

 

[Cerb]

Well, what'd wrong w/ most onboard NICs?
The NForce2 NIC is quite good.
I'm not voting due to lack of information of what hardware you're asking about, specifically.

 

[Corporate Thug]

we need a "it doesn't matter option"

 

[slicksilver]

yeah it doesn't matter.....save yourself the extra money

Raj

 

[Mitzi]

Originally posted by: shady06
we need a "it doesn't matter option"

My thoughts exactly.

 

[boyRacer]

using the onboard broadcom instead of the 3Com NIC i had saved me a whopping 1 second when i downloaded a 30mb file. 😕

so yeah it doesn't matter...

 

[screw3d]

On-board solution doesn't contribute to case clutter! I like to keep my PCI slots free 😀

 

[bgeh]

Originally posted by: Lifer
uses include online gaming, heavy browsing, and hefty file transfers, all while multitasking.

the nforce 2 nic takes up very little CPU usage. and i agree to what marvie said

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: rajkanneganti
yeah it doesn't matter.....save yourself the extra money

Raj

Unless you are with the government - I worked for a company that built computers, and did general IT work. Well a school we built PC's for insisted on using an add-on NIC in each computer, expensive sophisticated 3Com NIC's, even though they all had NIC's built right into the motherboard. The IT director of the school said that his tech people insisted that onboard NICs were all useless junk. I believe these were VIA VM266 based motherboards, something like that - onboard sound, video, LAN. It should have been quite adequate.
I used a socket 7 SIS-based motherboard already, and even its onboard LAN worked fine.

 

[Lifer]

Well, it was for this system here, MSI KT4VL, KT400 chipset.
but that was before I knew this mb needs RMA 🙁

 

[thorin]

In 99.5% of cases it's irrelevant.

Throin

 

[T3C]

there is really no diffrence anymore

 

[Horsepower]

If this poll is to see what we have, I understand. If it's for what we prefer, I doubt we have much choice.

 

[bocamojo]

Originally posted by: Jeff7

Originally posted by: rajkanneganti
yeah it doesn't matter.....save yourself the extra money

Raj

Unless you are with the government - I worked for a company that built computers, and did general IT work. Well a school we built PC's for insisted on using an add-on NIC in each computer, expensive sophisticated 3Com NIC's, even though they all had NIC's built right into the motherboard. The IT director of the school said that his tech people insisted that onboard NICs were all useless junk. I believe these were VIA VM266 based motherboards, something like that - onboard sound, video, LAN. It should have been quite adequate.
I used a socket 7 SIS-based motherboard already, and even its onboard LAN worked fine.

I used to work on a government installation as well, and it is true that they mostly prefer add on 3com cards. The main reason for this is that they are easily replaceable, have good driver support, and allow them to have a single, consistent piece of hardware to support. If they used whatever onboard NICs come with whatever different mobos they've purchased or leased over the last few years, it can become a real support nightmare.

However, this is not the case with a home PC. It makes perfect sense to use the built-in NIC, if your mobo came with one. There really is not a noticable performance difference. The only thing I could possibly think of being an issue is perhaps CPU utilization. I haven't run any tests or anything, but I would imagine that an add-on NIC would possibly take up less CPU cycles, depending on whether it has a processor onboard or not. I know some 3coms have onboard processors... However, again, for most of us, this wouldn't matter all that much.

Here's a quote from 3Com on one of their products with an onboard processor:

"Product Features

One of the main benefits of 3COM?s 3CR990-TX-95 NIC would be its 3XP processor which helps to reduce CPU utilization and enhance host system performance by offloading TCP/IP networking tasks to the onboard processor. This we feel is a great feature for both home and business consumers and can be very beneficial - especially when running LAN based multiplayer games. More beneficial for the business consumer the 3CR990-TX-95 NIC also comes with its own encryption chip which offloads IPSec encryption which 3COM claims delivers ?reliable, secure connections at wire speed?."

 

[gramboh]

That processing time is probably only relevant in high speed server application (where the server is doing at least 100mbit constantly, say a database server that is also doing heavy CPU/hard drive/RAM load). For home use it will never matter. I think the lack of clutter from onboard is the best part

 

[Brian48]

Ditto. I prefer the on-board only because it's less clutter.

 

[Confused]

If i've got onboard i'll use it, and will save my NICs for those computers i get/work on without NICs


Confused