Ethernet: onboard vs. NIC

A

Archer75

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Is there any sort of a performance difference between onboard ethernet and a add on card?

Typically onboard devices use CPU resources and a add on card does not. I'm just curious if anyone has done some sort of comparison between the two.
 
Thats right, onboard does use CPU cycles. Whilst a NIC in an expansion slot will typically have its own dedicated processor.

The only advantage in having a NIC card (rather then onboard) is for reaching the best transfer rates. And I mean a good solid network card, not some cheap thing that is on par with onboard.

Basically.. Reliability and throughput.
 
valve1138 said:
I'm not certain that is entirely accurate.
Click to expand...

//agrees

Onboard still can be, and usually are, hardware based. It's not like "onboard NIC" means something equivelant of "Winmodem" or something like that.

Earlier on...onboard NICs were still a hardware controller based NIC, such as Intel Pro or 3COM, and implemented onto the PCI bus. It's just...those chips that would have been on a PCI card happen to be sitting on your motherboard.

Now-a-days, they're integrated into your PCIe controller. You're not gonna touch that bandwidth potential with an old PCI card

Prior to that, such as nForce chipsets, they're right in the chipset..the pathways are..well..non-existant...they're already right there. No hitchhiking through the shared PCI bus.

And a few years prior to that..yeah they shared the PCI bus...but still the chips..no different..just built into your motherboard instead of the having them on a PCI card. But the PCI bus is still the PCI bus is still the PCI bus..regardless if integrated, or a card you slap in there.
 
There are some good on-board NICs (LOM), and some bad on-board NICs, some good add-on NICs, and some bad add-on NICs. There are on-board NICs which avoid the PCI bus for better performance, and there are add-on NICs which do so, and the reverse (on-board that goes through PCI, etc.).

You cannot successfully generalize on this dimension alone.
 
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