Question about NICs'

T

trinitron6_03

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 20, 2007
Messages
137
ok, for years i have heard this, and im honestly tired of going to sites and trying to figure out what is what.

PCI nic vs Onboard is there REALLY any major difference?

and 2nd

if (the stories are true) and the PCI Nic is slower then onboard, what aobut a PCI-Express x1 NIC? how about that?
 
With Windows XP, there isn't much difference between modern NICs. All modern NICs support TCP/UDP checksum and segmentation offload.

Windows Vista is a bit different. In Windows Vista, Microsoft introduced several new networking features that network chipset manufacturers can implement to improve performance. For example, they introduced TCP Chimney offload and receive side scaling (RSS) that divides network streams into multiple threads and distributes them across different processors and different processor cores. Microsoft says this significantly improves throughput and reduces cpu load with gigabit connections on PCs with multi-core processors. In contrast, network connectivity on Windows XP was always done with a single thread on a single processor.

A Microsoft document on Vista's TCP Chimney offload:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/b/5/5b5bec17-ea71-4653-9539-204a672f11cf/TCP_Chimney.doc

A Microsoft presentation (PPT) on Vista's RSS:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/b/9/5b97017b-e28a-4bae-ba48-174cf47d23cd/NET097_WH06.ppt

A related hardware feature required to fully support RSS is TX and RX queuing. Vista can leverage this capability while the XP NDIS driver architecture cannot.

In order to function correctly, these new capabilites must be supported by both the network adapter hardware and its Vista driver. Only a few adapters on the market fully support these features because Vista is so new. Among those that do are the Intel 82566DM and new Realtek RTL8111C. The Nforce 570 and 590 network hardware apparently does as well, but perhaps not with the current driver. The older Realtek RTL8111B found in many motherboards does not support this capability, nor do any of the shipping Marvell adapters, as far as can tell.
 
thank you for the extra info, but i was just asking about performance.

but let me rephrase,

its XP pro 32bit

onboard vs PCI

and PCI vs PCI Express X1

would i see any major difference>?
 
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