nVidia Professional 3000 vs Intel Desktop NIC?

I just got in a used Supermicro AMD server motherboard to replace my desktop motherboard in my server. It has a dual gigabit ethernet adapter, and has the nVidia MCP55 chipset. It appears this is the nVidia Professional 3000 series chipset.

I currently have a couple Intel desktop adapters, a PCI-e and PCI card, both gigabit.

Should I install the Intel desktop adapter in the server, and use it, or use the nVidia on board? Last time I used a nVidia network adapter was on an older desktop board (pre-Core CPU days), and it flat out didn't work. Intel has had rock-solid network adapters, but this *is* a server board, so I thought it must be at least reasonably good.

Any experience? I haven't found any solid answers yet via Google.

Install the Intel NIC in the server - I would recommend PCI-E for a server. Disable the nVidia NIC in the BIOS configuration.

Does the motherboard have IPMI?

Depend what you will be using the server for.

Best bet is to use iperf and run some test over your network to see what the performance is and if it acceptable for you or not. Run it using the Nvidia and then try the intel nics.

intel will be better, they are just better, period.

pci is more than capable of supplying full bandwidth to a single port gigE card.

cymon said:

Install the Intel NIC in the server - I would recommend PCI-E for a server. Disable the nVidia NIC in the BIOS configuration.

Does the motherboard have IPMI?

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I'm not sure if it does or not. I don't think it does. I have 1 PCI-e NIC in the current machine for the host OS & file serving duties, and a PCI NIC for a Hyper-V instance of WHS (only for backups).

Testing both NICs is a good idea. Apparently the nVidia NIC (it is dual-port) has software that does teaming on board, and the book almost sounds like you don't need a managed switch--but that doesn't seem right.