Should I use the onboard LAN or use a PCI NIC card???

[Duvie]

I don't remember my Linksys card on my p4 system taking any real cpu utilization when refreshing webpages and downloading things...

On my athlon system I am using onboard lan of mobo and limewire downloading about4-5 things (none at the high levels of 3mbits/sec but maybe added up to 130-140KB/s and cpu utilization was 40-50 percent....I hit refresh a few times and cpu chart shows like spikes to 100%...

That seems pathetic to me....

 

[uOpt]

If the onboard is a realtek chip that is normal. They use several times the amount of CPU for the same transfers.

To get better answers you would need to use a system monitor which splits up CPU into the system and userlevel part. For all this si showing it could be a screwed up browser.

Or try to measure with commandline ftp to get the browser out of the picture.