Am i better off using a dedicated ethernet card or onbard ethernet?

[blade85]

The topic has the question.

any answers? Does it make any difference what so ever???

Im currently running the connection directly through the ethernet port in my motherboard, but can get a 3com ethernet card for free off a friend and want to know if it will make any difference?

[zing_deleted]

well all the mobos I use have dedicated chips anyway so pretty much the same

[janipewter]

Not that you'll notice, if your motherboard is half-decent.

Zinglebard: I think he meant is there any advantage to using a PCI Ethernet card over the onboard Ethernet.

[zing_deleted]

and my answer says no doesnt it in a round about sort of way the words "pretty much the same" answer the question

[blade85]

and my answer says no doesnt it in a round about sort of way the words "pretty much the same" answer the question

lol :D

thanx for that.


this is the mobo im using now: http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=775Dual-VSTA&s=775

not the best, but gets the job done nicely.

under LAN it says:
- VIA® PHY VT6103
- Speed: 10/100 Ethernet
- Supports Wake-On-LAN


soo that means it has a dedicated chip for it??

[JackSon]

It means you don't need any additional Ethernet cards, unless you find yourself needing Gigabit LAN; which for broadband, you won't need just yet ;)

[zing_deleted]

lol :D

thanx for that.


this is the mobo im using now: http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=775Dual-VSTA&s=775

not the best, but gets the job done nicely.

under LAN it says:
- VIA® PHY VT6103
- Speed: 10/100 Ethernet
- Supports Wake-On-LAN


soo that means it has a dedicated chip for it??

Yes your north and south bridges are via also

[blade85]

okay thanx for the info! :angel:

[Halcyon]

I'd say use the onboard Ethernet.
It's built into the board and has it's own parts on it to do just that.
Adding a PCI ethernet card will just drain more power and take up more room in your system case.

[AntiSilence]

It means you don't need any additional Ethernet cards, unless you find yourself needing Gigabit LAN; which for broadband, you won't need just yet ;)

My motherboard has got 2 on board LAN ports. 1 x 10/100MBit and 1 x 1Gbit :) I don't use the Gbit one yet lol.

[janipewter]

There's a motherboard now which has 4 onboard gigabit LAN ports.

[Richy99]

onboard lan will proably take afew cpu cycles away but nothing drastic, the same as onboard sound

[ecksmen]

onboard lan will proably take afew cpu cycles away but nothing drastic, the same as onboard sound

Unless the add in card is fairly expensive, you'll find the onboard will be better, but difference would be negiable.

[hokkers999]

The topic has the question.

any answers? Does it make any difference what so ever???

Im currently running the connection directly through the ethernet port in my motherboard, but can get a 3com ethernet card for free off a friend and want to know if it will make any difference?

Not the slightest scrap of difference. If you want to have it as an add in card then go ahead, uses a slot you could use for something else if needed but performance wise it makes no odds. Either way you do it, there is a dedicated chip to doing the actual framing etc and sticking it on the wire. Simplest is to use the onboard as it was all designed to work together as a unit.

[janipewter]

Unless the add in card is fairly expensive, you'll find the onboard will be better, but difference would be negiable.

I've seen my onboard LAN hit 11.3MB/s - that's good enough for me since it's quite near the theoretical limit of fast ethernet, and I certainly wouldn't go dishing out on pci network cards just to get an extra megabyte per second.

[TheDon]

It's not just a case of what it's maximum throughput is, a dedicated card will perform better when your cpu is under heavy load as onboard offloads checksums to the cpu. So if you're constantly running at high cpu loads then dedicated is better. If you're just web browsing and downloading, there isn't the slightest bit of difference. If you really want the best performing NIC though, get one of these http://www.killernic.com/products/nic.aspx (which proves the "there's absoloutely no difference at all" brigade wrong) ..........just expect to pay £200 for it

[zing_deleted]

I thought maybe wrongly that onboard nic chips are tied to the pci bus. I know my twin marvel yukons are tied to the pci e bus so installing a card on either of these buses wouldnt make a difference

Let all us "no difference" brigade go out and pay 200 quid for a pro card yeah right smarty pants ;)