Nics

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Bigbacon

Fully [H]
Joined
Jul 12, 2007
Messages
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So had a power surge today which killed my onboard nic. I need to get a PCI nic to get it up and running again.

Does it really matter what i buy? Will some 5 dollar card work just as well as a 30 dollar card?

I was looking at 27 dollar intel card.
 
I ended up buying some cheap star tech. Windows installed a driver and it worked.

Now to hope it doesnt conflict with anything. Last time i used a pci card in this computer with sli running the pci co flicted with something and would lock up the machine sometimes. My pc.has every slot filled now.
 
You won't find much difference in cost for PCI NICs these days, so why not get one that used to be uber expensive like a server NIC? That's what I did. In iperf tests these seem to squeeze out anywhere between 3-10Mbps more on a gigabit link. Does it matter? Probably not. But when you're spending the same money, why not?
 
There are really no true network interface cards in the desktop consumer space anymore, they're all PHYceviers which implement the physical network layer and the rest is handled in software on the host CPU. This is why you never see any large performance changes between NIC brands, the host CPU does the grunt and CPUs since the mid 2000s have been fast enough to handle pushing network data without slowing down.

There have been a few attempts at dedicated hardware NICs, like the "Atheros Killer LAN" targeted at gamers, but they're complete shit. I have had a few motherboards with them, and had the chance to play with one of the dedicated PCIe versions. The performance benefit from the onboard DSP is negligible and the drivers are terrible. System crashes are common, as are weird connection issues.

I think the last good hardware NIC was the 3COM 3C90x series.
 
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