Ethernet Card for Gaming

[alanbjames]

I wonder if anyone will answer a question for a friend of mine.

A mate plays games like World of Warcraft and Startrek online and hes been suffering from lag and his ISP (Sky Fibre) say its not them hes on their upto 72mb package i think he said.

The PC was custom built by a firm which is local to where he lives and they have said that it is possible the onboard ethernet and a seperate ethernet card either an Intel based or a killer ethernet would maybe help his problem.

This is the motherboard that is in his computer
http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/990FX%20Extreme4/

It uses Broadcom BCM57781

[MovedGoalPosts]

I'd suggest that needing a separate NIC is a last resort.

We don't have a lot to go on here and need to determine what "lag" actually means. Is it really that information is taking too long to get between PC and server, and back again? Is it some other issue on the computer that means the response time of what is seen on the screen is slowed?

Rule out the computer. No antivirus getting in the way? Appropriate drivers installed for all hardware? Graphics settings at reasonable settings so the card can actually cope. Nothing else running that is eating resources?

Now look at the network. No other kit creating traffic locally? Are you actually getting the claimed speeds? Try tools such as that from thinkbroadband that can monitor latency.

[Stop It]

I have a Killer NIC E2100

Mainly because I wanted to see for myself if these "Gaming" Ethernet cards do anything.

The short answer? They do bugger all.

No, a modern onboard NIC will not cause lag at all.

I'd be going back to the ISP with tracerts to the WOW/STO servers and you may see that the issues start when the traffic leaves the ISP hops and starts their way to the games servers.

If that's the case it means that the route used by the ISP for your friends connection is a bit dodgy, this is notoriously hard to fix.

Aside from this yes as above make sure that nothing else software wise on the PC is at fault etc etc.

[damien c]

I have a killer nic and I don't use it, it's now sat in a box and will be put in a media server at some point and I will see if there is any issues, with it that as it makes no difference to gaming for the good and actually made my ping worse.

[alanbjames]

Well he "Thinks" he has fixed it.

It was either the Ethernet driver which he installed latest one or the ethernet cable he was using standard one sky gave him which was a really think Cat 5 cable and i had a spare 1m Cat 6e cable which his router is next to PC so is fine.

He did a speedtest and is getting 60.7mb down and 12.1mb up.

[Halcyon]

Back in the day you had to buy a good quality NIC but now onboard ones are fine.
In fact they may be a tiny little bit faster too as they are directly on the motherboard and not relying on a slot to go through but you wouldn't notice it.

[dragon]

Usually there is no reason to replace the NICunless you're experiencing issues with the existing one.

Occasionally some will have bad drivers or an incompatibility with either something in the pc itself or the bit of equipment they're connected to but it's fairly rare thesedays.

Also these Killer NIC's and such like make me laugh because lets face it it's really not going to be able to improve your latency since it's still connecting to a $2 chip in your router and the majority of the latency is usually in the access network anyway (E.g DSL or Cable segment, before it hits the Fibre back-haul) Even if the gaming NIC tagged the packets high priority any sensibly configured ISP network is going to discard user set QOS parameters in favor for any the ISP might choose to apply themselves (or none)

[qasdfdsaq]

Originally Posted by dragon

Also these Killer NIC's and such like make me laugh because lets face it it's really not going to be able to improve your latency since it's still connecting to a $2 chip in your router and the majority of the latency is usually in the access network anyway (E.g DSL or Cable segment, before it hits the Fibre back-haul)

Even a $2 chip in a router performs perfectly fine, most router chips introduce less than 0.1ms of latency. Yes, that's 0.0001 seconds of lag.

[Stuart]

Originally Posted by Stop It

I have a Killer NIC E2100

Mainly because I wanted to see for myself if these "Gaming" Ethernet cards do anything.

The short answer? They do bugger all.

No, a modern onboard NIC will not cause lag at all.

I'd be going back to the ISP with tracerts to the WOW/STO servers and you may see that the issues start when the traffic leaves the ISP hops and starts their way to the games servers.

If that's the case it means that the route used by the ISP for your friends connection is a bit dodgy, this is notoriously hard to fix.

Aside from this yes as above make sure that nothing else software wise on the PC is at fault etc etc.

Personally, I would have been surprised if the card did make a difference. The lag introduced by any chip is likely to be a fraction of that introduced by the ISP's own infrastructure

I've always thought of these gaming network cards as being similar to the Monster style AV cables. Incredibly expensive, Incredibly flash looking but not actually any better than cheaper alternatives.

[qasdfdsaq]

Originally Posted by Stuart

Personally, I would have been surprised if the card did make a difference. The lag introduced by any chip is likely to be a fraction of that introduced by the ISP's own infrastructure

I've always thought of these gaming network cards as being similar to the Monster style AV cables. Incredibly expensive, Incredibly flash looking but not actually any better than cheaper alternatives.

You forget hardcore gamers often frequent LAN parties and play vs. others in the same home, making the ISP irrelevant.

[alanbjames]

i have never understood Lan Parties, they are like Ann Summers parties for geeks.