Should I use my PCI nic or onboard?

gaming?

better get a killer nic

you're not a real gamer unless you have one

/troll to be honest dude, neither will make a difference when playing online... unless you have an internet connection and network equipment to max out the 100mb card (that said, i know of no game that uses that much bandwidth.... in online gaming lower latency is more important than bandwidth, and the latency between those two cards will be immeasurably small...) that netgear card looks like it has a realtek chip on it anyway from the picture, so you won't see any drop in CPU usage going off of your onboard, and even if it did have a better chip on it, the drop would be so negligible that you wouldn't notice....

ultimately if you like to transfer large files or something while gaming, you could look into running both simultaneously, one for lan transfers and one for dedicated internet connection...

you would get very little return for the complexity and trouble of the setup though


how's that for an incredibly over-complicated [H] post to a seemingly simple question?
 
Don't even bother with an add-on NIC unless:

A) You need the additional features and reliability offered by add-on NIC's

or

B) Your onboard NIC is dead/flaky.


I'm even going to bother giving high-end NIC's a lick of credit when it comes strictly to gaming. For all intents and purposes you'll get nothing out of it if the conditions above aren't met.
 
Onboard. And P.S. network speed is not quite "weakest link in the chain." It's ((1/L1)+(1/L2)+(1/L3)) etc. where L is latency. It has an upper limit determined by the maximum hardware speed and and bandwidth restrictions, etc. (this is all accounted for in the general formula anyway). The difference between a 100Mbps and 1Gbps LAN connection in your house is pretty insignificant compared to all other sources of latency, but it's non-zero.

Also, PCI-E is a significant step up from crappy 33MHz 32-bit PCI.
 
stunning said:
Your onboard NIC. The pci card is only 100mb while the onboard is a GB
Click to expand...


Wait, you don't get full gigabit with addon nic? I bought one for my server thinking it would be better than the onboard, but mostly because I want a secondary nic as I will use the onboard
for management and the other for vlan trunk... did not install it yet. So what is the solution to having more nics then?

Edit: NM, I read that wrong. You meant that particular one he linked to right?
 
Red Squirrel said:
Wait, you don't get full gigabit with addon nic? I bought one for my server thinking it would be better than the onboard, but mostly because I want a secondary nic as I will use the onboard
for management and the other for vlan trunk... did not install it yet. So what is the solution to having more nics then?

Edit: NM, I read that wrong. You meant that particular one he linked to right?
Click to expand...

yes, he did, but depending on what you plugged it into, it could be a problem... technically a good gig card can saturate a 33mhz 32bit PCI bus (the PCI slots in most desktop boards)... pcie obv doesn't have that problem....
 
Thanks for the info. I will use the onboard. I was thinking it was a bit old school being pci and all.
 
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